January 17
Ameren Missouri Offers New Energy Efficiency, Demand Response Programs
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Now that the Missouri Public Service Commission (PSC) has approved Ameren Missouri’s revised multiyear energy efficiency and demand response plan, the energy company is offering a new round of programs totaling $75 million in rebates and incentives for residential and business customers. Additional programs now available through Ameren Missouri include the Single-Family Income-Eligible program, which provides a comprehensive package of whole-home upgrades.
Great River Energy, the not-for-profit power cooperative serving 1.7 million people across Minnesota and Wisconsin, announced a partnership with Prisma Photonics to deploy its PrismaPower monitoring technology across approximately 90 miles of transmission lines in northern Minnesota. The partnership will enable real-time monitoring and notification of threats to Great River Energy’s power lines and to its member-owners and customers.
As part of the sustainable energy plan for Colorado Springs Utilities and related to a 2023 request for proposals for 1,700 megawatts of new generation and battery storage, several major projects are underway to provide reliable and cost-effective power for generations to come, the Colorado public power utility said in December.
Duke Energy’s C-Suite is getting a shakeup. The company announced that its board of directors has appointed Harry Sideris as president and chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors, effective April 1, 2025. Sideris, currently president, will succeed Lynn Good, who will retire from her management and board roles at the company after more than two decades.
The amount of carbon-free energy built in the U.S. last year far eclipsed the growth of new fossil-fueled power plants. The U.S. grid added a total of just over 56 gigawatts of power capacity last year. A whopping 96 percent of that came from solar, battery, wind, nuclear, and other carbon-free installations, per new Cleanview analysis of U.S. Energy Information Administration data.
More than $635 million in grant awards will be used to expand the alternative fuel corridor across the country, officials with the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration said Friday. Officials said the FHWA was working closely with the U.S. Department of Energy, through the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation to implement the national network of EV chargers and zero-emission fueling infrastructure.
General Motors is turning to artificial intelligence and machine learning to find the optimal locations to install new electric vehicle chargers to best serve drivers, the company announced. As part of the project, data scientists at GM are using predictive analytics and geospatial algorithms to evaluate EV traffic patterns in the U.S. to determine where additional EV chargers might be needed.
When Ryan Saffarini got his first electric car in 2021, he hit a speed bump of sorts: His Tesla arrived before the EV charger did. “I ended up understanding why people have range anxiety,” he recounted to Canary Media. For two weeks, the chief technology officer at Sun Valley Solar Solutions, a solar energy contractor and EV-charger installer based in Chandler, Arizona, had to drive about 20 miles to a Tesla Supercharger station to refuel.