January 26
Xcel Energy Starts Installing Smart Meters in the Dakotas
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
Xcel Energy has begun installing smart electric meters in North and South Dakota, as part of a multi-year project to offer its customers cleaner, safer and more reliable energy through advanced grid technology with more options to manage their energy use. Xcel Energy will install the new devices for its 100,000 North Dakota customers and 100,000 South Dakota customers in 2024 and into 2025. The first meters will be installed in Fargo and West Fargo, North Dakota and Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
San Antonio, Texas-based public power utility CPS Energy has entered into a long-term power purchase agreement with Genesis Consolidated Industries Holdings for a 150-megawatt solar project called Exodus 1. The solar farm will be located in Caldwell County, Texas. The solar project is expected to come online in the summer of 2025 and will help to serve the energy needs of the San Antonio community for a 25-year period.
Heat pumps are becoming an increasingly common way for Americans to heat and cool their homes, and with the growing focus on decarbonization and the added impact of federal and state-level incentives for purchasing a heat pump, this trend is likely to accelerate in the years ahead. The Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative (SECC) recently conducted an online survey to assess Americans’ awareness, interests and concerns related to electrifying space heating, cooking, water heating and transportation.
Xcel Energy customers in Minnesota will likely soon have good reason to hold off on running dishwashers or charging vehicles until bedtime. The state’s largest utility is asking regulators to approve a major change to how residential customers have paid for their electricity for decades. In December, the company proposed moving away from the standard, flat hourly rate that almost all its customers currently pay and replacing it with a variable “time-of-use” rate design that charges more for power during periods of high demand.
Get Your Weekly Edition
Industry News
A clean grid will need a lot of batteries to balance out the ups and downs of solar and wind power. Today, those batteries tend to come in two forms. The first is utility-scale battery farms that take up acres of land and cost up to hundreds of millions of dollars. The second is lots of little batteries tucked into garages and basements that can provide backup power when needed, plus share some of their stored energy with the grid at large.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Jan. 8 announced the selection of 67 applicants to receive nearly $1 billion through EPA’s Clean School Bus Program Grants Competition. The awards will help selectees purchase over 2,700 clean school buses in 280 school districts serving over 7 million students across 37 states. Ninety-five percent of buses will be electric, and prioritized school districts in low-income, rural and/or Tribal communities make up approximately 86 percent of the projects.
Canada’s Smart Grid Innovation Network created a smart energy benchmark model to support Canadian utilities in the transition to net zero. The initiative, supported by national funding, involved 12 utilities in six provinces across the country serving almost 7.5 million customers – almost half of the electricity customers – to benchmark efforts and progress with decarbonization with the implementation of a smart energy system.
Energy efficiency is often called the “lowest-hanging fruit” of decarbonization — it’s a lot cheaper to use less energy than to make more clean energy. But making buildings more energy-efficient does cost money — and most building owners don’t have tens of thousands of dollars to spend on improvements that can take years to pay off.
