June 12
Ameren Adds $3 Million to COVID-19 Clean Slate Program
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
Building on $1 million of funding announced in March, Ameren Missouri intends to put up $3.5 million to help customers pay off utility bill balances, including $3 million for its COVID-19 Clean Slate Program. The Clean Slate program was designed to help customers pay off past-due utility bills. It will unite community partners and agencies to administer the program and aid income-eligible customers clear the balances on their account after paying 25 percent of its current balance. Ameren will announce the options for the remaining $500,000 later this year.
Xcel Energy customers face a trio of barriers to EV adoption in the utility’s Minnesota service territory, including a lack of information and awareness about their potential benefits, high upfront costs for charging installations and “suboptimal incentives to charge when energy costs are lowest,” the utility told state regulators in a June 1 compliance filing. The utility in its annual transportation electrification plan update told the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission that EVs “could be a beneficial resource to the grid or create significant challenges depending on when and how they charge.”
In its 2019 Sustainability Report, released this week, Edison International demonstrated progress toward a zero-carbon system of the future, with its largest subsidiary – Southern California Edison (SCE) –providing 48 percent of its energy carbon-free. For SCE, emissions have also fallen nearly 50 percent since 2005. The company coupled this with Charge Ready Transport, the largest truck and transit charging initiative in the United States, and infrastructure to support more than 200 light-duty vehicle charge ports.
Digital transformation has been well underway for years, driven by a mix of opportunity, competition and social evolution. Yet widespread adoption remained slow – until now. Several factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic, have aggressively accelerated the pace of digital change and quickly removed the resistance that was once its biggest opponent. Shelter-in-place and stay-at-home orders necessitated widespread acceptance of many digital and virtual technologies, fundamentally shifting the way people perform jobs and engage with businesses to establish a new normal.
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Industry News
The U.S. solar market is expected to achieve record installations in 2020 despite the coronavirus impact, even as the distributed solar segment takes a big hit. The U.S. solar market logged its largest first quarter of installations on record by a significant margin, according to new data released Thursday by Wood Mackenzie and the Solar Energy Industries Association. But the numbers confirm what the solar industry has feared: distributed solar has been seriously affected the coronavirus, and no part of the industry has been entirely insulated.
If there is one thing that we are as equally passionate about as a utility executive and consumer advocate, it is our unwavering commitment to customers. Though we may come from different perspectives at times, we share a commitment to finding innovative solutions that lower costs and help ensure that utility customers have the power they need. That’s why during this uncertain time when many people are facing financial hardship, we're working together to promote Arrearage Management Programs — a caring and cost-effective tool to help those who fall behind on their utility bills.
Until recently, climate experts projected that it wouldn’t be possible to decarbonize the electric grid until 2050 – and that moving to fully renewable energy could raise the price of electricity for consumers. But the cost of wind, solar, and battery storage has fallen so quickly that in just 15 years, the U.S. could feasibly run on 90-percent clean electricity, with no increase in electric bills. And adding new renewable infrastructure could create more than half a million new jobs each year. By 2045, the entire electric grid could run on renewables.
The combination of a pandemic, supply-chain disruptions, economy-wide lockdowns and a worldwide recession is bad news for virtually every industry, and the EV sector is no exception. Add a historic decline in oil prices making fossil fuels cheaper at the pump, and 2020 is shaping up to be an especially rough year for the plug-in car market. Global passenger EV sales declined sharply in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. China, the world’s largest auto market, saw EV sales plunge by 60 percent in February compared to the same month last year.
