July 28
Salt River Project Customers Surpass Electric Vehicle Adoption Target
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
Salt River Project (SRP) recently announced a total of 40,585 electric vehicles (EVs) leased or purchased in its service territory as of April 30, 2023, which is above its target of 39,000 by that time. The reported increase in EV adoption rates in recent years comes as SRP continues to offer a wide variety of EV incentives and programs. Among these is a specialized EV price plan where customers can charge their vehicles at a lower rate during off-peak hours.
Launching a demand response program is only half the battle. Planning, executing, and measuring results is its own endeavor. The (arguably more important) part of ensuring the success of your demand response program lies in the marketing, promotion and enrollment of participants. After all, a program with no participating devices can skew your results, leave you without enough data to make future actionable decisions, and even jeopardize future funding and support for the program.
ComEd’s work to connect struggling customers with bill assistance while also providing temporary, part-time employment to residents from low-income neighborhoods was recently recognized by utility-industry association Chartwell Inc. in one of three awards presented to ComEd and its parent company Exelon in Chartwell’s 2023 Best Practices Awards.
West Penn Power has started work to connect two solar energy projects in Fulton and Franklin counties to the electric grid. The two solar farms, developed by AES Corp., will generate 220 MW of renewable energy that is designated for a customer power purchase agreement. The first project will see West Penn Power, a subsidiary of FirstEnergy, expand its McConnellsburg substation in Fulton County and add a new terminal at the substation.
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Industry News
In a teach-the-teacher setting, educators are traveling to Dominion Energy Ohio’s technical training center this week to learn about energy conservation and efficiency. The utility is partnering with the Ohio Energy Project (OEP), an educational non-profit that will deliver a half-day e3 Smart Program on July 26. The program provides the curriculum to help educators teach students about the fundamentals of energy, why it’s important to conserve it and how to become more energy efficient.
In Texas, record-setting heat is causing record-setting electricity demand, as power-hungry air conditioners become essential to daily life. Though wind and solar power are helping to keep the grid online amid this unrelenting heat, the state has another crucial clean energy resource it could tap in times of extreme weather — if only regulators would push to make it happen.
The U.S. Department of Energy on Friday proposed new energy efficiency standards for residential water heaters that the agency says will save consumers $11.4 billion annually on their energy and water bills. If finalized, the new standards would take effect in 2029. The new standards would require many electric water heaters to achieve efficiency gains with heat pump technology and gas-fired instantaneous, or tankless, water heaters to make improvements through condensing technology.
As a historic 10-day heat wave threatened brownouts across California last summer, a small San Diego County school district did its part to help: It captured excess power from its electric school buses and sent it back to the state’s overwhelmed grid. The eight school buses provided enough power for 452 homes each day of the heat wave, and the buses were recharged only during off hours when the grid was not strained.
