January 6
SMUD Announces Virtual Power Plant Initiative
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
To help meet its 2030 Zero Carbon Plan to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from its power supply, Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) has entered into an agreement with Swell Energy. Per the agreement, Swell will act as the aggregator for SMUD’s new My Energy Optimizer Partner+ program, a residential customer-driven virtual power plant initiative.
New Jersey’s Public Service Electric and Gas Company (PSE&G) won the prestigious 2022 Drive Electric Award – Utility Award from Plug In America. The national honor was given for PSE&G’s Clean Energy Future – Electric Vehicle Program and its leadership in support of advancing EV infrastructure. The 2022 Drive Electric Awards were presented in Los Angeles in October 2022.
Congrats! If you’re here, you either have or are considering a demand response (DR) or distributed energy resource (DER) program and now you’re figuring out how best to communicate and market your program to drive enrollment. After all, the legwork to get a program off the ground is only a small component of its continued success.
Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE) and its customers continue to reap the benefits of its multi-year customer relief and energy infrastructure investment plan. The plan, approved by the Maryland PSC in December 2020, continues to provide improvements to the electric and natural gas systems for BGE’s 1.3 million electric customers and more than 680,000 natural gas customers in central Maryland.
Get Your Weekly Edition
Industry News
The United States has long hovered on the cusp of an offshore wind energy boom, even as the industry has soared worldwide. After many fits and starts, only seven turbines are spinning off the U.S. coast, representing 0.1 percent of the total global capacity of offshore wind farms. Now that’s all starting to change.
A Hawaiian Electric program that provided cash incentives and bill credits to customers with battery storage connected to their rooftop solar systems – the Battery Bonus program – officially reached 30 percent of its allotted capacity at the end of 2022. The program, about a year and a half after its launch, had achieved a 15 MW capacity on Oahu, marking the end of Tier 1.
The number of smart meters installed on the U.S. grid has risen consistently in recent years to reach 103.1 million in 2020, according to an assessment of the country’s demand response and advanced metering capabilities published recently by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Advanced meters in operation represent more than 64 percent of the 159.7 million meters in the United States.
The new year is bringing energy bill savings to Kassy Allen and others in Cleveland’s first rooftop solar program designed specifically for low- and moderate-income families. City leaders and others joined Allen’s family for an official switch-throwing ceremony at her year-old home on Dec. 16. Despite gray skies and chilly temperatures, newly installed panels on the roof started producing power right away.
