February 9
AEP Vows to Add 8,300 MW in Renewable Energy by 2030
Top consumer smart grid news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
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AEP is not calling it that, but the utility company has detailed its own version of the now-dead federal Clean Power Plan and vowed Tuesday to live up to ambitious carbon reduction goals over the next three decades. AEP delivered a new report outlining the utility company’s goals for the clean energy future. Those include a strategy which would reduce carbon dioxide emissions from its power plants to 60 percent below year 2000 levels by 2030 and 80 percent from 2000 by 2050.
Last month, all three of California’s major IOUs submitted applications to CPUC detailing their respective strategies for how to transition residential customers to TOU pricing. TOU pricing, if done right, is a low-cost strategy to help meet California’s climate and clean energy goals. This innovative tool can help the state rely more on clean energy and less on fossil fuels, at the same time delaying the need for new infrastructure and reducing costs and harmful emissions.
Energy efficiency improvements are saving PSEG Long Island customers millions of dollars each year. In 2017, residents and businesses across Long Island and the Rockaways that participated in PSEG Long Island’s energy efficiency programs saved more than 280,000 MWh of electricity, equivalent to more than $46 million per year in bill savings. The amount of energy saved is also good for the environment, equal to taking about 45,000 cars off the road.
TVA is in the early stages of preparing its first new integrated resource plan since 2015. There have been “significant” changes since TVA’s last IRP, such as declining demand and increasing penetration of distributed energy resources, Bill Johnson, the utility’s president and CEO, said Feb. 2 during a telephone conference call to discuss the company’s financial results for the first quarter of its fiscal year.
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Industry News
South Australia plans to roll out solar panels and Tesla Inc. batteries to at least 50,000 homes to form what its government says will be the world’s largest virtual power plant. Beginning with a trial of 1,100 public housing properties, 5 kilowatt solar panels and 13.5 kilowatt-hour Tesla Powerwall 2 batteries will be installed free of charge and financed through electricity sales.
New solutions are emerging for one of the biggest challenges posed by DERs. DERs like customer-sited solar, batteries and electric vehicle chargers, hold the promise of revolutionizing the power system, allowing customers to take greater control of their electricity usage and potentially replacing some traditional grid infrastructure.
As one of the first states to roll out smart meters en masse -- and the only one to build a central, statewide data repository to share that data with customers and competitive energy companies -- you'd think that Texas would be way ahead in the energy-data sharing game. But it isn't.
New York State could be on its way to crafting the most aggressive energy storage goal in the country. The target is still a work in progress, but based on Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D) recent announcement and interviews with analysts, it could be set above 1,500 MW by 2030. California’s energy storage target is 1,300 MW by 2020.
