June 13
Reading Municipal Light Department Commissions Energy Storage System
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
Reading Municipal Light Department officially commissioned the River Park Energy Storage System in May with a ribbon cutting and networking event. Local legislators, town officials and industry partners were in attendance. The River Park Energy Storage system will improve RMLD’s grid resiliency and provide peak demand reduction. Peak demand reduction helps decrease RMLD’s transmission and capacity costs, which represent nearly 40 percent of the RMLD cost structure.
Xcel Energy provided an update on the Ten Mile Creek Solar Project during a recent meeting with officials from St. Croix County Wisconsin. At the meeting, Xcel officials discussed several topics, including how private landowners have agreed to lease 100 percent of the land needed. The company also said it is considering adding a battery energy storage system into the first phase of the project, instead of a future phase.
Faced with growing challenges in managing peak demand during cold weather months due to extreme weather events, home and transportation electrification, and supply chain challenges, energy providers are increasingly turning to winter demand response programs to maintain grid stability and ensure customer comfort.
Officials with ComEd said its Energy Efficiency Program helped customers save more than 13 million megawatt-hours of electricity in 2024. The program installed energy efficiency measures that have delivered savings to customers since 2012, ComEd said, which resulted in nearly $1.3 billion in savings on their electric bills. The energy-saving results are based on an independent evaluation of the program by Guidehouse, a global consulting and managed services provider.
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Industry News
Electric utilities can make calls and send demand response text messages to customers who have provided their phone number, the Federal Communications Commission said on Monday. “When a consumer gives a utility their phone number, they give their prior express consent to receive non-telemarketing demand response calls and texts,” the commission wrote.
Republicans and Democrats alike are less likely to support renewable energy than they were five years ago, according to a survey released last week by the Pew Research Center. The results mirror growing pockets of opposition to solar farms, reignited political support for coal plants and moves by President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans to kill federally funded clean energy projects.
Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), which spans the central U.S., should have adequate generating capacity next summer but faces “significant uncertainty” in overall resource adequacy projections, according to a survey by the grid operator and the Organization of MISO States (OMS), a group of state regulators. The OMS-MISO Survey provides a resource adequacy view over a five-year horizon.
Utility-scale battery storage in the United States is poised to more than double over the next two years and will close out 2026 at nearly 65 GW – a rapid rise from 17 GW in the first quarter of 2024. The U.S. Energy Information Administration published its Short-Term Energy Outlook on Tuesday, showing a rapid increase in anticipated energy storage resources. Counting projects larger than 1 MW in the electric power sector, EIA said domestic storage capacity will rise from about 28 GW at the end of Q1 2025 to 64.9 GW at the end of 2026.
