July 24
Colorado Springs Utilities Hits New Peak Demand
This week's top smart energy news, curated by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative (SECC).
Member News
Colorado Springs Utilities on July 20 reached a new peak electric demand at 1,034 MW. “Despite record-setting demand, our electric grid and generation resources met customer needs without significant service disruptions or outages,” the Colorado utility noted. "A large part of this success is thanks to our customers, specifically those enrolled in the Peak Energy Rewards Program. Peak Energy Rewards participants helped us reduce peak demand by approximately 25 MW.”
Outside the utilities sector, AI is still widely viewed as a digital phenomenon: abstract, virtual and cloud based. In my work with energy providers, the conversation is focused on something vastly different: AI's physical footprint. Due to the adoption of AI, data centers are expanding rapidly in size, scale and number, bringing with them rows of servers, dense compute infrastructure and unprecedented electricity demand.
U.S. electric rates increased 2.6% from 2024 to 2025 after adjusting for inflation, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory said this month in a 2026 update to an influential journal article researchers published last year on retail electricity price trends and drivers. Since 2019, nominal residential electric rates rose by 33%, commercial rates grew 26% and industrial rates increased by 27%, widening what LNBL described as a persistent gap between residential and C&I pricing.
Renewable and other non-emitting energy sources supplied more than half of the electricity that Puget Sound Energy (PSE) customers used during the past four years, marking a major milestone as Washington State’s largest utility works to meet the state’s clean energy requirements. In its 2026 Clean Energy Compliance Report, PSE said clean energy resources provided 50.6% of customer electric load during the 2022–2025 implementation period.
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Industry News
Haven Energy is the newest company offering home battery service in Massachusetts for a low monthly payment, a model supporters say could accelerate adoption of residential storage. Starting in four counties in the southeastern part of the state, the company will provide customers with a 15-kilowatt-hour home battery, installed and ready to go, starting at $29 a month, with a 10-year contract.
Carbon dioxide emissions from the United States’ electric power sector rose by 4%, or 58 million metric tons, in 2025, due to growth in electricity generation and coal use, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said in a report Tuesday. Total energy-related carbon dioxide emissions increased by 2%, or about 115 million metric tons, over the same period, compared with 2024.
A “first-of-its-kind” program in Illinois is drawing attention to the momentum of distributed energy resource (DER) systems and utilities' active deployment of them to support grid reliability. At the same time, ratepayer affordability has been top of mind to scale these solutions amid the rise in electrification demand from AI data centers nationwide.
If you wanted to save some money by learning how to check your home for air leaks, poor insulation, and power-hungry light bulbs, the Department of Energy’s website was ready to help. And if you needed an expert, the site guided you to another page for help lining up a professional energy assessment, a well-established first step to cut utility bills and curb pollution at the same time.
