June 21
Tendril Acquires FirstFuel Software
Top consumer smart grid news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
Tendril, the company that’s built up a portfolio of software and services to help utilities manage their residential customers, has acquired FirstFuel Software to expand its offerings to utilities' commercial and industrial customers as well. This is the third acquisition for Tendril since last year’s major investment, led by private equity firm Rubicon Technology Partners, meant to give the Boulder, Colo.-based company the capital to expand its scope of business for its utility clients.
PSEG Long Island is rolling out a mobile educational center designed to help answer customers’ questions about electric power, such as the advantages of installing smart meters. Coined the My Smart Energy Lab, the 48-foot multimedia-equipped mobile trailer draws power from roof-mounted solar panels and has a dozen interactive learning stations. It will soon be appearing in neighborhoods scheduled for smart meter installations and at other events.
California’s Sacramento Municipal Utility District has been recognized as the 2019 Public Power Utility of the Year by the Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA). SEPA on June 12 announced the winners of its 2019 Power Players Awards including Public Utility of the Year. SEPA said that SMUD “has displayed excellence in the expansion of their Marketplace reach beyond industry norms.”
PPL Electric Utilities was named Investor-Owned Utility of the Year by SEPA, owing to the success of its Distributed Energy Resource Management System (DERMS) for renewable power. The system is responsible for managing distributed energy resources (DERs), such as microgrids, solar and battery storage. Those resources are connected to PPL’s grid to optimize power quality. DERMS allows greater hosting of such connections by using its resources to offset the negative impacts of DERs in high penetrations, such as high-line voltage or over-operation of connected capacitor banks.
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Industry News
A new report from Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables and the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) shows that the United States installed 2.7 GW of solar photovoltaic (PV) in the first three months of the year, making this year’s first quarter the largest first quarter ever for the U.S. solar industry. In May, Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables and SEIA announced that the United States surpassed two million solar installations during the first quarter of the year. The solar industry is expected to reach three million installations in 2021 and four million in 2023.
The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities on Monday released a draft plan that aims to help the state achieve 100 percent clean energy by 2050, relying on a mix of electrification, renewables, energy storage, nuclear energy and grid modernization. In the near-term, the plan calls for developing 600 MW of energy storage by 2021 and deploying 330,000 light-duty electric vehicles by 2025.
Utilities are starting to capture the value of the data coming from the edges of their distribution grids. But they’ll need to transform their approach to keep up with the flood of data to come. Greentech Media’s Grid Edge Innovation Summit 2019 kicked off Tuesday with a series of keynote panels and presentations on this common theme.
Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) has released its annual analysis of global electricity supply and demand, concluding the world’s electric sector remains on track to help keep temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, at least through 2030. The 2019 New Energy Outlook predicts wind and solar will supply almost half of global electricity demand in 2050. They are now the cheapest sources of power across most of the world, and by 2030, the report concludes they will undercut commissioned coal and gas plants “almost everywhere”.
