January 16
Eversource Hits Milestone in Deployment of Smart Meters
This week's top smart energy news, curated by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative (SECC).
Member News
Eversource has installed 100,000 smart meters in Massachusetts, a major milestone in the company’s multi-year effort to upgrade more than 1.5 million meters throughout the state. The milestone installation occurred in the town of Easthampton in Western Massachusetts, where Eversource crews have been steadily exchanging thousands of meters each month.
Duke Energy has brought online a 50-MW, four-hour battery energy storage system (BESS) at its former Allen coal plant on Lake Wylie, serving customers in North Carolina and South Carolina, and has also unveiled plans for additional battery storage and new jobs at the Gaston County site. The first BESS, at a cost of approximately $100 million, began serving customers in November.
Salt River Project (SRP) has earned the highest ranking in residential customer satisfaction in the Western U.S. by J.D. Power. The study gave SRP a customer satisfaction score of 583 on a 1,000-point scale. This is the 24th consecutive year and the 26th time that SRP has achieved the top customer satisfaction ranking in the West Large segment. SRP was also the highest ranked utility among all large utilities nationwide.
The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) recently put out a report that examines how every state is advancing zero-emission transportation. The U.S. Electric Vehicle State Policy Landscape Report analyzes 16 electric vehicle (EV)-supportive policies across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It shows that states are already using proven policy tools to advance EV transportation.
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Industry News
2025 was, to put it very mildly, an eventful year for the U.S. power sector. The rise of data centers drove soaring electricity demand, debates about energy affordability hit a fever pitch, and the Trump administration went to unprecedented – and legally dubious – lengths to prop up coal and stymie renewables. Yet despite the excitement, the broader electricity mix looked about the same as ever.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed the Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act, aiming to tackle rising electricity costs through the development of battery storage and virtual power plants, new planning processes, energy efficiency investments and other initiatives. The bill directs Illinois utilities to install 3 GW of grid-scale storage by 2030 and develop programs that pay customers to harness the demand flexibility of resources such as batteries, smart thermostats and EV chargers.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration recently published its first energy-sector forecasts through 2027 in the January Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO). EIA expects U.S. electricity use to grow by 1% this year and 3% in 2027. This increase would mark the first time since 2007 that power demand has risen for four years in a row and the strongest four-year growth period since 2000.
In some parts of California, the lead state on electric vehicles, utilities are facing a challenge that will eventually spread nationwide: Local grids are struggling to keep up with the electricity demand as more and more drivers switch to EVs. The go-to solution for this type of problem among most utilities is to undertake expensive upgrades, paid for by all their customers, so that the grid can accommodate the new load.
