April 28
Duke Energy to Harden North Carolina’s Power System with $13B Initiative
Top consumer smart grid news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
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Duke Energy last week announced a Power/Forward Carolinas initiative aimed at modernizing and hardening the electric grid, while generating 14,000 new jobs and more than $1 billion taxes revenues over 10 years. According to Duke, when the plan is fully executed more than 80% of North Carolina customers will be connected to a "self-optimizing grid."
PG&E has announced the launch of the updated PG&E Marketplace with a new user interface and design. According to a release, PG&E Marketplace is an easy and user-friendly website for customers to find energy-saving appliances and consumer electronics. PG&E Marketplace allows customers to identify energy-efficient products and appliances from many of their favorite retailers.
Over the past half-decade, Illinois utilities have spent billions on building out a smarter, cleaner and more efficient power grid. While the changes are not without controversy, utilities say reliability has improved while average customer bills have remained flat.
Entergy Arkansas selected cloud-based demand response provider Comverge to manage a Bring-Your-Own-Device pilot program for the utility. Comverge said that it will aggregate consumer-purchased Wi-Fi-enabled smart thermostats to "evaluate a potential new demand response resource" for the utility. Comverge and Entergy Arkansas are already working together on the Summer Advantage residential demand response program to complement those efforts.
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On March 3, 2014, thermometers read 15° Fahrenheit and across the state, Texans turned their heaters on full blast as they prepared to head to work. Operators at the operations center for Texas’ electricity system saw the price of electricity skyrocket and around 8 a.m. prices jumped to nearly $5,000 per megawatt-hour. This event provided a crucial investment signal to wholesale market buyers and sellers that more flexible resources are needed for times of stress, on either the generation side or on the demand side.
At the turn of the millennium, only wide-eyed dreamers in the power sector would have claimed renewable energy would play a major role on the U.S. grid. Wind and solar were simply too expensive and too difficult to integrate. Fast-forward to 2017, and that dream is becoming a reality, according to a survey of more than 600 utility professionals.
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Platform business models have redefined the modern economy. From titans of personal computing and e-commerce such as Apple and Amazon to ubiquitous financial services that we use with hardly a second thought, industries everywhere have reoriented from one-directional pipeline delivery systems to multisided platforms on which information and services flow in many directions between actors.
