August 13
Uplight Plus Offers Utilities New Digital Services
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
Uplight this week announced Plus, a new solution that bundles multiple utility programs into simple, personalized offers in a consumer-friendly digital experience, making it easy for customers to understand and enroll in beneficial energy and billing programs. Leading utilities, including AES, Duke Energy and others, already launched Plus as part of successful pilots.
Dominion Energy has introduced its Green Fleet initiative, designed to transform its fleet of more than 8,600 vehicles. The Green Fleet initiative will help Dominion Energy achieve its goal of net-zero carbon dioxide and methane emissions. The initiative calls for 75 percent of its passenger vehicles and 50 percent of its work vehicles to be converted to electric power by 2030.
Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG) on Thursday unveiled an agreement to sell its 6,750 MW fossil-fuel plant portfolio for $1.92 billion to ArcLight Capital. The deal is expected to close either late in the fourth quarter of 2021 or the first quarter of 2022, PSEG said in a press release. The deal includes 13 generation units in PSEG's home state of New Jersey, as well as New York, Connecticut and Maryland.
Biden administration's announcement last week that half of new U.S. cars and light-duty trucks should be zero-emissions vehicles by 2030 was lauded by National Grid’s President Badar Khan. “National Grid applauds President Biden's executive order establishing a target that half of all vehicles sold in the United States be electric by 2030 and proposed rules to restore and strengthen tailpipe emissions and fuel economy regulations,” Khan said.
Get Your Weekly Edition
Industry News
Climate change is a major threat for utilities, as made clear by the winter storms, heat waves and droughts that have wreaked havoc on U.S. electricity and natural-gas networks this year. Consultancy ICF estimates that U.S. utilities face a $500 billion “resiliency gap” over the next 30 years in terms of costs to harden their infrastructure against extreme weather.
Backed by state funding, a tech company is installing 120 electric vehicle chargers at apartment complexes throughout California in an effort to remove obstacles that prevent lower-income renters and residents from owning EVs. The company, EVmatch, received a more than $700,000 grant from the California Energy Commission (CEC) to deploy the charging stations in the parking lots and garages of apartment buildings in Santa Clara, Los Angeles and San Diego counties.
New analysis from Pecan Street has found that it is possible to free 12-16 percent of the distribution system’s current capacity without upgrades to existing utility infrastructure. Pecan Street used data from energy use on homes with solar PV in New York and Texas to explore the grid impacts of poor residential power factor and the system benefits of power factor correction.
The California Energy Commission (CEC) on Wednesday adopted energy efficiency standards for newly constructed and renovated buildings that stakeholders say are the country's first statewide building code that strongly incentivizes all-electric construction. The 2022 Energy Code approved by the commission includes elements that encourage electric heat pump technology for space and water heating, expands solar and battery storage standards, and adopts electric-ready requirements for single-family homes.
