April 17
BGE Wins the Energy Star Partner of the Year Award
Top consumer smart grid news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
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Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE) won the Energy Star Partner of the Year – Sustained Excellence Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The Energy Star Partner of the Year – Sustained Excellence Award is the highest honor that can be bestowed on a company by the EPA and DOE. It recognizes organizations that have received the Partner of the Year award more than three times and continues to surpass previous achievements in energy efficiency. BGE has won the Partner of the Year award 10 times.
For the utilities industry, disseminating critical health, safety and resiliency information remains the top priority during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many companies, however, know this isn’t the only role they can play during this crisis. They have seized this moment to ensure they continue to help customers manage energy use — a critical need given that more than 90 percent of the country is now under instructions to stay indoors.
As of this post, we’re well into COVID-19 stay-at-home orders in most parts of the United States. Although it doesn’t take much imagination to guess that residential energy use is going up with much more time at home than usual, we’ve been trying to ascertain exactly how much, and what the new load curves could mean for utilities and utility customer programs. We’ve finished our first analysis using data from two U.S. geographies, using over seven billion hourly AMI data points from more than 700,000 homes.
SECC recently explored the capabilities of electrification to address climate change and benefit consumers through new programs and policies. The study, titled Beneficial Electrification: Industry Views on Consumer Needs, consisted of a review of industry publications and in-depth interviews with 11 experts. It took a particular interest in residential buildings and transportation. Three major points emerged among the variety of responses.
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Industry News
As more U.S. transit agencies take their first steps toward electrification, an ecosystem of companies is bursting to life to help them with that transition. But with such novelty, it can be hard to find field data on the difference it makes to hire a professional fleet-charging service. Now we have an early case study to point to. Amply Power, the fleet charging concierge startup from Green Charge Networks founder Vic Shao, just published the results from its first transit customer, Tri Delta Transit in Northern California’s Contra Costa County.
Clean Power Alliance, a California community choice aggregator, recently signed an agreement for a 100-megawatt standalone battery storage project. This is the first energy storage agreement for the CCA. Approved by the Clean Power Alliance Board of Directors on April 2, the 100-MW/400-megawatt hour Luna Storage standalone lithium ion battery storage project is the largest energy storage agreement for a CCA in California and one of the largest in the entire state, according to Clean Power Alliance.
The economic halt caused by COVID-19 is expected to decrease global carbon emissions by 5 percent in 2020, the largest annual decline ever, according to an April 9 analysis from Carbon Brief. U.S. power sector emissions are expected to drop 7.5 percent this year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration's latest Short-Term Energy Outlook released last week. Meanwhile, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions rose 2.9 percent in 2018 above 2017 levels, according to the Environmental Protection Agency's 2020 inventory of economy-wide U.S. emissions, released Monday.
New York is struggling with the country’s worst coronavirus outbreak, but it’s also pushing ahead on its ambitious clean energy goals. Those include major expansions of wind and solar power, more energy storage to manage that intermittent supply — and, on the demand side of the equation, programs that can turn utility customers from passive consumers into active grid-balancing participants. Take GridRewards, a program launched last week by community-choice aggregator Sustainable Westchester and building energy software and demand response provider Logical Buildings.
