February 17
Ameren Missouri Expands Solar Generation
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
Ameren Missouri takes another important step toward bringing more renewable energy to customers by announcing a key approval in the planned acquisition of the company's largest-ever solar facility, a 200 MW solar installation in central Missouri. Construction is expected to create about 250 jobs and, once functional, produce enough energy to power about 40,000 homes.
Xcel Energy will appear before the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission this spring to seek approval of a plan announced in August that will bring 750 new high-speed charging stations featuring around 1,500 individual charging ports to Minnesota and parts of neighboring Wisconsin by 2026. Xcel says it will work with communities and property owners to determine the exact locations of the new stations.
Texas public power utility CPS Energy has reached agreements with three companies for solar capacity, firming capacity and energy storage capacity, closing out the utility’s FlexPOWER Bundle initiative stemming from a request for proposals that was launched in 2020. In total, the FlexPOWER Bundle will deliver 580 MW of solar, 50 MW of storage and 500 MW of natural gas firming capacity.
Tucson Electric Power has received the green light from state regulators to move ahead with their three-year Transportation Electrification Implementation Plan, which provides a roadmap for preparing the grid for extra energy loads, driving electric vehicle adoption and building an equitable charging infrastructure.
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Industry News
For the first time, thousands of Tesla’s Supercharger stations will be available to anybody driving a battery-powered car, the White House said on Wednesday. Right now, only Tesla drivers can access the automaker’s network of 7,500 fast-charging stations, which are scattered along highway corridors, in public parking lots and other convenient locations across the United States.
Developers plan to add 54.5 GW of new utility-scale electric-generating capacity to the U.S. power grid in 2023, according to the Energy Information Administration’s Preliminary Monthly Electric Generator Inventory. More than half of this capacity will be solar power (54 percent), followed by battery storage (17 percent).
The U.S. Department of Energy last week proposed new energy efficiency standards for refrigerators and clothes washers that the agency says will save consumers about $3.5 billion annually on energy and water bills. Products covered by the proposed rules include residential clothes washers, refrigerators, refrigerator-freezers and standalone freezers.
While automakers toil to figure out trucks that run on batteries, Nomad Transportable Power Systems has designed a trailer that carries batteries. These power-supply trailers carry all the equipment and controls needed to operate a utility-scale grid battery, but unlike typical grid storage installations, these ones can be moved.
