January 30
SRP Provides Progress Report on 2035 Sustainability Goals
This week's top smart energy news, curated by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative (SECC).
Member News
Salt River Project (SRP) is making progress toward reaching its 2035 Sustainability Goals, which focus on reducing SRP’s carbon footprint, ensuring a resilient water supply, evolving SRP’s grid and customer energy solutions, promoting a sustainable supply chain, reducing waste and engaging the customers and communities SRP serves.
If energy affordability is not top of mind for all utility leaders in 2026, it should be. In just a few short years, inflation, data centers and myriad other factors have emerged to create a difficult landscape for consumers, including many who have not struggled with their energy bills in the past.
Uplight this week announced new partnerships with CORE Electric Cooperative, Imperial Irrigation District and Santee Cooper, signaling growing national demand among public power providers and cooperatives for demand flexibility solutions that can quickly and cost-effectively strengthen grid reliability and customer affordability.
Nearly 480,000 New Jersey customers participated in PSE&G’s energy efficiency programs from October 2020 through September 2025, collectively saving more than $900 million, according to PSE&G’s latest Clean Energy Future-Energy Efficiency (CEF-EE) report. The savings reflect a broad range of energy efficiency offerings designed to help customers use less energy and better manage utility costs.
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Industry News
When it comes to state politics, 2026 is already in full swing. As legislators reconvene and new governors are sworn in, it’s becoming clear that leaders will focus on one energy issue in particular this year: affordability. While last year’s elections didn’t bring any major changes to the White House or Congress, skyrocketing energy prices played an undeniable role in propelling Democrats to victory in state elections across the country.
A U.S. District Court Judge in the Western District of Washington ruled in favor of a lawsuit that challenged the Trump administration’s freeze of the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program. The NEVI program is a $5 billion federal initiative to build reliable, high-speed electric vehicle charging infrastructure along America’s highways.
Rising demand and new technologies are forcing utilities to coordinate distributed energy resources on an unprecedented scale, a trend likely to continue in 2026, analysts and stakeholders say. But intimidating demand forecasts from power-hungry data centers, coupled with aggressive policy shifts away from renewables and efficiency standards, are turning power providers toward large-scale generation – possibly to the detriment of aggregation and demand response programs.
Omaha Public Power District is making good progress with its advanced metering infrastructure initiative and associated technology upgrades. OPPD Director of Customer Experience and Operations Matt Hardebeck recently provided an update with the OPPD Board of Directors. Since summer, OPPD has installed more than 11,300 new meters as part of the AMI pilot program.
