February 23
PG&E Meets California’s 2020 Renewable Energy Goals
Top consumer smart grid news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
PG&E has reached California’s 2020 renewable energy goal three years ahead of schedule, and now delivers nearly 80 percent of its electricity from GHG free resources. The company announced today that 33 percent of its electricity came from renewable resources including solar, wind, geothermal, biomass and small hydroelectric sources in 2017.
NV Energy has selected Bidgely to help it personalize offerings and reinvent its home assessment, leveraging the company's cloud-based machine learning tools to improve customer experiences. The Nevada utility will utilize several services offered by Bidgely including appliance disaggregation, home assessment surveys, a field auditor tool and customer service enhancements.
After a few initial forays, GE has decided on a new approach to energy storage. The electric industry giant elevated its storage business this year to a standalone unit within the GE Power division. As an “incubator” within the broader company, it will have dedicated funding to pursue storage projects around the world.
Landis+Gyr reported continued growth with public power utilities during 2017, signing 46 contracts for smart grid technology and services. The contracts represent a wide variety of market offerings, including more than 350,000 metering endpoints, along with distribution automation and load management devices, software and smart grid services.
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Industry News
The numbers are in, and in the U.S. alone, electric vehicle sales increased 21 percent last year -- from 158,614 vehicles sold in 2016 to 199,826 vehicles sold in 2017. December 2017 also marked the 26th consecutive month of year-over-year sales increases for EVs, led by the Chevy Bolt, followed by the Toyota Prius Prime and the Tesla Model X.
In this age of Amazon, Uber, Airbnb and the like, it’s easy to understand why so many of us in the utility business are ambivalent—to say the least—about the trend toward distributed generation. After all, why should any established and profitable business welcome the arrival of yet another “disrupter”?
Consumers Energy will eliminate its use of coal-fired electricity and reduce its carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2040. The Michigan utility, owned by CMS Energy, also revealed five-year environmental goals including saving one billion gallons of water and reducing waste to landfills by 35 percent.
When Elon Musk offered to build what would be the largest grid storage battery installation in the world in South Australia last year, he set off a chain of events that may have implications for the entire world. In a show of typical Muskian over-the-top bravado, Elon promised to build the entire facility in 100 days or it would be free. It was completed nearly 40 days early.
