February 26
Ameren Missouri Files $8.4 Billion Grid Modernization Plan
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
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Ameren Missouri submitted an updated $8.4 billion Smart Energy Plan with the Missouri Public Service Commission that supports grid modernization efforts over the next five years. The plan includes installing more than one million smart meters, more renewable generation and infrastructure upgrades that bolster reliability. It also includes smart technology that can rapidly detect outages and restore service in seconds, as well as new storm-resilient utility poles, power lines and underground cables.
For the second year in a row, Xcel Energy has hit a significant milestone in its quest to deliver 100-percent carbon-free electricity to customers by 2050. Xcel reported that it broke its own record for a single-year drop in emissions in 2020, cutting carbon emissions company-wide by approximately six million tons, a 12-percent reduction over 2019 levels. That’s equivalent to taking nearly 1.2 million cars off the road for a year.
The benefits are outweighing any costs of the Future Energy Jobs Act (FEJA), ComEd reported to the Illinois Commerce Commission last week, saving residential customers an average monthly savings of more than $1.30 between 2017 and 2020. FEJA is a state-enacted law passed in 2016. Its goal is to advance renewable energy and increase savings through new energy efficiency options for less than the caps created by the legislation itself.
Dominion Energy South Carolina recently filed its modified integrated resource plan, including a “preferred” scenario that would retire its coal generation fleet by 2030 and convert its Cope Station coal plant to natural gas. The majority of Dominion’s scenarios included large blocks of solar and solar-plus-battery-storage added between 2030 and 2048, with the potential to add 2,000 MW of solar from 2026 to 2048.
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Industry News
Texas regulators issued a moratorium on utility disconnections for customers who do not pay their power bills, following a spike in power prices that impacted millions of customers across the state who were without power for days last week. The Public Utility Commission of Texas held an emergency meeting Sunday to address the billing spikes that had customers charged up to 70 times more than what they would normally pay for electricity.
The U.S. could double its capacity for new wind and solar power, save billions of dollars and cut millions of tons of carbon-dioxide emissions from its generation fleets if federal incentives can be aligned to deploy a suite of technologies to unlock the full capacity of transmission grids. So says a new report from The Brattle Group, modeling the benefits of a set of “grid-enhancing technologies” across the wind-power-rich grids of Kansas and Oklahoma.
Landis+Gyr and Evergy said this week that they have signed a 13-year contract that extends the smart grid services agreement for Evergy’s Kansas Central and Kansas Central South utility operations and includes the addition of advanced meters to update and expand grid management capabilities. Under terms of the agreement, Landis+Gyr will continue to provide hosting of AMI operating software, field maintenance and monitoring of network equipment.
A new report from Michigan’s DTE Energy noted that thousands of installations and upgrades, combined with maintenance efforts across the region, boosted power reliability by 25 percent last year, reduced outages, and expanded electric capacity. Last year, the company replaced nearly 13,000 utility poles, installed more than 31,500 new fiberglass cross arms on overhead power lines to replace old wood cross arms, upgraded more than 209 miles of circuits, and built three new substations.
