July 28
How Can Energy Usage Data Be Leveraged to Benefit Consumers?
Top consumer smart grid news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
Data can be a valuable tool for better engaging consumers and developing improved products and services; however, there are still a lot of unanswered questions about how utilities and other organizations can safely utilize energy usage data for these purposes. With their new Anonymous Data Service program, ComEd is one of the utilities that is exploring this emerging area.
Hearings on how to shape the future of the grid in Ohio continued this week with Phase 2 of PUCO’s PowerForward initiative. Full day meetings took place at the PUCO’s offices in Columbus on July 25 through 27 to explore technologies for expanding and improving the grid structure to provide greater value, improve costs and address environmental concerns for Ohioans. Plans call for the presentations to be webcast through the PUCO’s website.
PG&E ranked as one of the top five energy-efficient energy companies in the country on the new Utility Energy Efficiency Scorecard released by the industry association ACEEE. Ranked third in the country, PG&E led California as the top-placed utility in the state for energy efficiency.
In the US, Southern Company has launched its energy storage pilot program in partnership with subsidiary, Gulf Power, EPRI and Tesla. Under the pilot, Southern Company in partnership with Tesla developed a 250KW/1MW-hour lithium industrial energy storage system at a technology research and development center owned by Gulf Power.
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Industry News
In the summer, when cooling demand spikes and a utility needs to reduce load, turning down one air conditioner doesn't help much. Turning down a thousand would help, however. Which is a simple enough thing to realize, but difficult to execute, manage and monetize. When utilities talk about aggregating resources, they split into two distinct markets: residential load, and commercial and industrial.
According to a new report from Navigant Research, the installed base of smart street lights is expected to reach nearly 73 million worldwide by 2026. The report analyzes the evolution of smart street lighting technology and market trends, providing global market forecasts of smart street lighting hardware, software applications, and services, broken out by segment and region, through 2026.
An increase in power outage information along with higher price satisfaction are the top drivers of the sixth consecutive year of improved customer satisfaction with residential electric utility companies, according to the J.D. Power 2017 Electric Utility Residential Customer Satisfaction Study released last week.
A federal judge recently protected Illinois’ Future Energy Jobs Act, which is expected to grow the state’s solar capacity to over 3,000 MW by 2030 — enough to power approximately half a million homes. The expected influx in distributed resources like solar panels prompted ICC to set in motion NextGrid, an 18-month study focused on rethinking the roles of the utility, the customer, and energy solution providers.
