February 24
PSE Awards Funding for Solar Installations
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
Puget Sound Energy (PSE) has awarded $753,620 in grant funding to nine organizations across its electric service area for the installation of new solar projects. The recipients include local non-profits and tribal entities serving low-income and Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) community members. The funding comes through PSE’s Green Power and Solar Choice programs.
Duke Energy is hoping to test and accelerate commercial fleet electrification by building a microgrid-integrated charging depot at its innovation center in North Carolina. The charging depot will allow fleet operators to experience a commercial-grade fleet depot, integrated with energy storage, solar and optimization software, showcasing a model for reliable fleet electrification.
In February 2009, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) provided a $787 billion stimulus investment intended to lessen the economic impact of the housing market crash. That same year, as I was finishing my last semester of my graduate program, one of my professors stopped mid-sentence during a lecture to say, “By the way, our budgets got cut by 30 percent this year, good luck finding a job when you get out of school.”
Under an updated Smart Energy Plan filed with the Missouri Public Service Commission last week, Ameren Missouri called for $9.9 billion of investment into items such as smart technology, stronger poles, power line upgrades and other infrastructure to improve grid reliability. Already, similar efforts have borne fruit, according to the company.
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Industry News
As a demand-response manager for California utility PG&E, John Hernandez knows all about how hundreds or thousands of battery-equipped homes can be remotely controlled to serve the grid’s needs, much as central power plants do. These aggregations of controllable home solar-plus-battery systems are called virtual power plants, or VPPs for short.
Across virtually every industry and nearly every type of customer interaction, digital customer engagement via mobile apps has surged, raising customer satisfaction and increasing brand loyalty for companies with superior digital strategies. Utilities, apparently, are not getting the message. According to the J.D. Power 2023 U.S. Utility Digital Experience Study, the number of large utilities currently offering mobile apps has declined in the past two years.
As sales of EVs continue to grow, inoperable and poorly maintained public charging stations increasingly frustrate drivers, according to an ongoing study by J.D. Power. Charge point unreliability has increased 50 percent from 2021 to January 2023, according to data provided by Brent Gruber, Executive Director of J.D Power’s Electric Vehicle Practice, from 14 to 21 percent.
Community solar installations dipped last year but are expected to grow rapidly over the next five years, according to a new report from Wood Mackenzie. Community solar installed capacity declined 16 percent in 2022 compared with last year, according to US community solar market outlook: H1 2023. Last year’s drop in installations was primarily driven by interconnection delays that hindered growth in key markets.
