April 15
ComEd Reaches Record Reliability in 2022
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
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ComEd set a new measure for its service reliability this year, with the first three months of 2022 marking its most reliable electric service period in more than a century of operations. Last year, the company had provided some of its highest levels of reliability to date – more than 68 percent better than in 2011 when ComEd began a series of grid improvements.
EV charger and electrification technology provider Qmerit is partnering with Uplight. Their collaboration aims to expand the ability of utilities to provide end-to-end charging support for EV buyers. Qmerit’s electrification service implementation capabilities, including a national network of EV charger installers, will be coupled with Uplight’s EV Solution Suite.
Rate platform provider GridX closed $40 million in Series C funding led by Energy Impact Partners (EIP). Moore Strategic Ventures, Sunfox Capital and NGP ETP also participated in the round. In related news, Hunter Horgan of MSV joined the company’s board of directors, and Chris Black was named CEO. The funding and personnel moves are intended to accelerate development of GridX’s rate analytics and complex billing offerings, and help build out its sales and marketing, product and engineering teams.
The 22.6 MW Stony Knoll Solar power plant in Surry County, North Carolina recently commenced operations. The solar project – owned and operated by Duke Energy Sustainable Solutions (DESS) – was selected as part of the competitive bidding process established by the state’s 2017 solar legislation. The plant contains 76,600 panels, which will power the equivalent of 5,000 homes.
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Industry News
The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) ordered utilities to create a pilot program designed to push community-based organizations (CBOs) to help consumers with utility bills. Utilities will be required to develop a CBO Case Management Pilot Program proposal for California communities hardest hit by electric bills during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, relative to their available resources.
Water heaters are a potentially massive resource when it comes to balancing the ups and downs of grids that are increasingly powered by renewables. They use more energy than almost anything else in a home except equipment for space heating and cooling. The question is, how big of a grid resource could they become – and how much should utilities and their customers invest in preparing them to serve that role?
New York has been a leader on climate change mitigation activities and, on April 8, took a step further when a budget agreement was reached between Gov. Kathy Hochul and state legislators that commits the state to achieving a fully electric statewide school bus fleet by 2035. Most of New York’s 50,000 school buses run on diesel today.
According to a new report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, roughly 27 percent of U.S. households, or 34 million, had difficulty paying energy bills or kept their home at an unsafe temperature because of energy cost concerns in 2020. While a high number, it is lower than in 2015, when 37 million households, or 31 percent, reported similar issues in 2015, according to EIA’s Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS).
