January 24
Itron-Bidgely Partnership Could Unlock More Value from Smart Meters
Top consumer smart grid news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
Itron meters will soon feature built-in analytics and device disaggregation capabilities provided by Bidgely, under a partnership announced Thursday by the two utility services companies. There are close to 100 million smart meters on the U.S. electric grid, and analysts say further integration between the hardware and analytics capabilities is one way to unlock new opportunities for utility savings and distributed resource integration.
The built environment consumes 40 percent of all energy and produces 40 percent of all carbon emissions. Half of that energy is wasted due to process and equipment inefficiencies. Building owners and occupants are demanding better as social pressure drives interest in advanced technologies, sustainable operations and on-site renewable energy. Unfortunately, the energy value chain is not designed to deliver.
SECC has released its 2019 analysis that reveals five key themes on consumers’ top energy-related needs and wants. Residential consumers in the United States and Canada are more ready than ever to engage in smart energy programs if their most pressing needs and wants are adequately addressed by industry stakeholders, according to the report.
Have you seen SECC’s latest case study on SMUD, “Engaging Customers Through a One-Stop Digital Platform”? The case study details how SMUD recognized that digitally connected families were one of their largest and fastest-growing segments – a perfect fit for a marketplace product. Instead of developing a marketplace on their own, they took a truly customer-centric approach and asked customers what features they’d like to have and even had them help select the vendor!
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Industry News
Falling battery costs, increasing renewables on the grid and a focus on resilience and reliability will continue to drive growth in the energy storage sector in 2020. Storage has had a good year, experts say: multiple states have made storage deployment a priority, utilities began rolling out pilot programs and battery prices continued to plunge.
Arizona Public Service, the largest utility in the sunny southwestern state, committed itself Wednesday to 100 percent carbon-free power by 2050. The promise includes interim targets of 65 percent clean electricity by 2030, with 45 percent coming from renewables, and removing coal from its portfolio by 2031. With this decision, APS joins a growing list of major electric utilities committing to decarbonize their production.
This past November, in the pages of this publication, Jennifer Runyon posed the question, “How customer-centric should utilities be?” Citing Patty Durand, President & CEO of the SECC, and her organization’s many years of research into utility consumers’ attitudes about energy, the answer came back as a resounding, “very!” Increasingly, utility companies are heeding that call.
The past decade has been a wild ride for America's massive electricity sector. Cheap wind and solar have turned the industry's conventional economic wisdom on its head. At the same time, climate change has begun directly impacting utilities – from hurricanes that have forced billions of dollars in recovery and grid-hardening costs for utilities like NextEra’s Florida Power & Light and Texas’ Oncor, to the wildfires that drove Pacific Gas & Electric into bankruptcy.
