July 16
SCE Plans for 38,000 EV Charging Stations
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
Southern California Edison (SCE) on Monday kicked off plans to install 38,000 new electric car chargers throughout its service area over the next five years, the largest initiative of its kind by any investor-owned utility, according to a company spokesperson. The utility said the $436 million program, financed by ratepayers, will include an “added emphasis” on installing EV chargers in multifamily apartment and condo buildings.
Smart grid solutions firm Itron has announced an expansion to its portfolio of distributed intelligence applications with the addition of Grid4C’s artificial intelligence (AI) software. Grid4C has added its AI-enabled Grid Edge AI app into Itron’s Raleigh Distributed Intelligence (DI) Lab where customers can access the solution via the Itron Enterprise Application Center later this year.
Promising convenience, entertainment, comfort, energy savings and other benefits, smart home devices have taken off with consumers in recent years. While the economic uncertainty around the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to have impacted this growth, smart speaker adoption continues to exceed “nearly every consumer electronic device”, including, at one point, the iPhone.
Puget Sound Energy (PSE) wants new energy resources for its Washington customers and has accordingly issued a new request for proposals for new energy and capacity of up to 1,669 GW hours and 1,506 MW of capacity resources. The first all-source RFP issued since the passage of Washington’s Clean Energy Transformation Act (CETA), this effort will see qualified parties bid to meet PSE’s long-range electricity needs.
Get Your Weekly Edition
Industry News
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed into law a series of bills that accelerates the state’s transition to clean energy. S3223 establishes numerical requirements, zoning standards for installing EV supply equipment and make-ready parking spaces. A1653 encourages the development of zero-emission vehicle fueling and charging infrastructure in redevelopment projects. A4554 establishes a successor program to solar renewable energy certificate program.
Electrify America says it plans to more than double its number of charging stations throughout the U.S. and Canada. The expansion will include 1,800 fast-charging stations and 10,000 individual chargers to be installed by 2025 and is part of Electrify America’s previous commitment to invest $2 billion over 10 years on EV infrastructure, education and access in the U.S.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has set a goal to reduce the cost of utility-scale, long-duration energy storage by 90 percent within a decade to bolster a grid powered by renewable energy. The program, dubbed Long Duration Storage Shot, will encourage development of systems with a duration of at least 10 hours, which can help mitigate the day-to-day and seasonal variability of renewable energy.
Fueled by a wealth of new solar projects and the tumbling cost of solar, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced this week that New York has achieved 3 GW of solar deployment across the state. Currently, that means solar in New York could power more than 500,000 homes. Solar growth has increased by 2,100 percent in the state since deployment of the NY-Sun initiative in 2011, while solar costs simultaneously declined 69 percent.
