December 15
Itron Joins Green Button Alliance to Help Advance Energy Efficiency
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
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Itron, Inc. joined the Green Button Alliance (GBA) as a member. GBA is a non-profit and U.S.-based organization that fosters the development, compliance and widespread adoption of the Green Button energy and water data-access and -sharing protocol. The Green Button Connect My Data and Green Button Download My Data standards enable energy and water users to digitally access their usage data.
The electric vehicle (EV) market has grown exponentially over the last several years, with analysts anticipating a 16-percent market growth by 2035. In the United States, that growth could increase beyond that figure after the 2022 presidential mandate to increase EV manufacturing to account for 50 percent of all new vehicles by 2030.
Con Edison released its third quarter Clean Energy Update this week, which shows that customers are on pace to break last year’s record for solar installations. Con Edison’s Clean Energy Update is a quarterly snapshot of four important clean energy technologies: solar generation, battery storage, electric vehicles and building electrification adopted by customers in the five boroughs of New York City and Westchester County.
One of California’s smaller utilities wants to get ahead of the big problem of optimizing and dispatching distributed energy resources. The Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) is rolling out a slew of new technologies – including smart meters, two-way switches, fiber optic cables and DER management software – to leverage the new resources being added to the grid.
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Industry News
Rosana Francescato is an electric vehicle enthusiast who likes to plan ahead. So, when she and her husband drove their all-electric Chevy Bolt from the San Francisco Bay Area to New Mexico to visit family last fall, she plotted out every charging station along the route — both to minimize the time spent waiting for hours-long charging sessions and to ensure they didn’t end up stranded in the middle of the desert.
Volkswagen is launching a bidirectional, vehicle-to-home pilot program with HagerEnergy GmbH in Sweden. EV customers will be able to use the stored energy of the vehicle’s battery, in conjunction with a stationary energy system, to provide supplemental power to a home during peak times or in the event of a power failure. Volkswagen said it is now one of the first providers to provide a bidirectional charging solution based on the Combined Charging System standard used by EVs in Europe.
On a 20-acre parcel outside the tiny Southern California town of New Cuyama, a 1.5-megawatt solar farm uses the sun’s rays to slowly charge nearly 600 batteries in nearby cabinets. At night, when energy demand rises, that electricity is sent to the grid to power homes with clean energy. To make renewable energy from intermittent sources like solar and wind available when it is most needed, it’s becoming more common to use batteries to store the power as it’s generated and transmit it later.
Erika Myers can talk about EV charging standards all day. After all, as head of the world’s premier organization dedicated to promoting them, that’s pretty much her job. She does wish she could spend less time talking about the EV charging-standards topic that’s been making headlines lately, though: the debate over which type of EV charging plug will end up dominating the U.S. fast-charging market.
