February 19
BGE Reports Sharp Decrease in Service Interruption Time
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
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Baltimore Gas & Electric officials said the average length of a service interruption has decreased by 55 minutes, or 38 percent, since 2010. The drop is due to several factors, including investments in electric system infrastructure upgrades, increased adoption of innovative technologies and the company’s dedicated employees. Since 2010, the number of electric outages has decreased 45 percent while the outage length has gone down by 38 percent.
On a plot adjacent to vacant lots located just south of 38th Street on Chicago’s South Side, a new mural celebrates some of the most prominent Black figures of Chicago’s history – and of the nation. Behind that mural, a utility-scale battery storage facility represents what many see as the city’s energy future. Both were installed by ComEd as part of the utility’s Bronzeville Microgrid pilot, along with other neighborhood amenities in a project the utility calls Community of the Future.
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) announced a 60-percent increase in contracted solar capacity since October 2020. TVA said that a 2020 request for proposals for solar capacity and its Green Invest program added 964 MW of contracted solar and 130 MW of battery storage to the TVA system, pending environmental review. The increase was due in part from Green Invest commitments from Knoxville Utilities Board, Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Vanderbilt University through a partnership with Nashville Electric Service.
Duke Energy Florida will have invested approximately $1 billion to construct or acquire a total of 700 MW of solar power facilities from 2018 through 2022 in Florida. That will more than quadruple the amount of solar energy on the system. This year alone, Duke Energy Florida has broken ground on two new solar sites, both expected to be completed by the end of 2021.
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Industry News
Cathy Zoi, CEO of EVgo, pays a lot of attention to the economics of public electric vehicle charging, both in terms of the widely varying upfront costs from location to location, and the long-term calculations that go into making sure their revenue exceeds their costs over their lifetime. “We have a first-mover advantage, but we also have a first-learner advantage,” she said, with data collected from about 1,500 fast chargers across 800 locations to date.
Minnesota homeowners and solar groups are backing a bill to prohibit HOAs from banning rooftop solar panels. Jonathan Edmonson had plans to put a 16-kilowatt solar array on the roof of his suburban Minneapolis home, covering its dark blue roof with sleek black panels. In October, though, the homeowners association for his Blaine community rejected his proposal, citing aesthetic concerns and the lack of established guidelines for rooftop solar in the association’s bylaws.
The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) last week opened a new rulemaking to consider ways to deal with growing energy arrearages – the total amount of unpaid customer bills – in the state due to the COVID-19 pandemic and extended a suite of utility customer protection measures through June 30. CPUC President Marybel Batjer highlighted the need for regulators to address the growing energy arrrearages that have accrued during the pandemic during a Thursday meeting.
Although Hawaii mandates only called for energy generation to reach 30 percent from renewable sources last year, the rollout of solar energy and wind production for Hawaiian Electric pushed it to a 34.5 percent renewable portfolio standard. To put that in perspective, that means the company’s clean energy use on the grid has more than tripled in 10 years. The higher production played its part in that, but lower consumer demand also helped last year.
