June 14
CLEAResult Announces ATLAS™ Heat Pump Calculator
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Last week, CLEAResult, North America’s largest energy efficiency provider, launched CLEAResult ATLAS™ Heat Pump Calculator – a fully customizable platform designed to help utility customers determine the suitability of a heat pump system for their home. CLEAResult ATLAS™ Heat Pump Calculator features personalized cost-saving estimates, side-by-side comparisons of heat pump types and detailed incentive information, enabling utility customers to make informed choices tailored to their unique energy needs.
Avangrid donated 300 pounds of decommissioned wind turbine blades to a startup company to test its process for blade recycling. The startup is called WindLoop, launched by students at Yale University with the mission to build a circular economy for the wind industry by recycling wind turbine components. Wind turbine blade recycling has long been a challenge due to the expense of transporting blades and extracting blade materials, like glass fiber and epoxy resin.
In the U.S., residential customers outnumber businesses by nearly seven to one, yet business customers contribute two-thirds of utility load and revenue. There is widespread acknowledgment that business customers are an extremely critical segment to engage. As our industry transforms to tackle broad energy sector decarbonization goals that include energy efficiency, load flexibility, rates adoption and electrification, this trend will only magnify.
Faced with demand for more solar energy offerings that have risen to more than 4,700 customers in its service area, Ameren Missouri this week announced plans to build a new facility west of St. Louis to expand its Community Solar program by 7 MW. It would be the third facility built for the program, which allows customers to choose as much of their energy usage to be sourced from dedicated community solar facilities as they desire.
The number of smart meters in North America reached almost 146 million at the end of 2023 and with ongoing growth is expected to number 182.9 million in 2029. In a new study, Berg Insight reports that at the end of 2023, the overall penetration in North America surpassed 80 percent with 130.6 million smart electricity meters in the United States and 15.4 million in Canada.
Keeping homes cool in the summer is getting more expensive for people across the U.S. as climate change drives temperatures up, finds a June 3 report from the National Energy Assistance Directors Association and Center for Energy Poverty and Climate. The average U.S. electric bill over the June-through-September period is projected to be $719, a nearly eight-percent increase year over year and the highest average in 10 years, the report says.
The results of a study conducted by researchers at Department of Energy national laboratories suggest that existing community solar projects are expanding solar access to a more demographically diverse population. “Specifically, we find that community solar adopters in 11 states are about 6.1 times more likely to live in multifamily buildings, 4.4 times more likely to rent and earn 23 percent less than rooftop solar adopters, on average,” wrote the authors of the study.
Last year was a record year for clean energy investment in the U.S. – and this year is off to an even stronger start. In the first quarter of 2024, private investment in clean energy and electric vehicles reached $71 billion, a new quarterly record for the country. According to a recent report by research firm Rhodium Group, the figures for Q1 represent almost a 40-percent increase from the first quarter of 2023.