June 21
Xcel Energy, NREL Study Heat Pump Performance in Colorado
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
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A study by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Xcel Energy examined the performance of heat pumps in Colorado’s high altitudes and cold weather. The study measured the performance of two heat pump configurations across a range of conditions at NREL’s Thermal Test Facility in Golden, Colorado, which sits at 5,600 feet of elevation. It found that the benefits of air-source heat pumps are reduced as temperatures decrease.
Roughly three-quarters of small and medium-sized businesses in the United States are interested in participating in a demand response program (73 percent) or electrifying currently non-electric business operations (74 percent), according to a new survey from the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative, a nonprofit organization that studies consumer and small business trends in the energy transition.
When Mark Waclawiak started running the operational performance team at Avangrid in 2020, he quickly realized the whole utility was hungry for data. Similar to many other utilities, Microsoft’s Excel was the “heart of data management,” limiting the potential for analytics and insights. “Our biggest challenge was these underlying infrastructures and systems that are not necessarily built for analytics,” said Waclawiak on the With Great Power podcast.
ComEd has interconnected more than one gigawatt of distributed energy resource (DER) capacity to its grid, including 57,780 residential rooftop solar systems. Overall, the more than 59,000 DERs on the ComEd smart grid includes 1,582 commercial systems, 118 community solar farms, 23 industrial and two utility-scale projects. This has helped place Illinois first among Midwestern states based on DERs and second for total capacity.
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Industry News
Tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act have upended the cleantech landscape. Over $110 billion has already flowed to new clean energy manufacturing plants, and the many federal rebates and tax credits have encouraged investment by individuals and businesses alike. Still, actually collecting the cash is harder than it sounds, especially for those unfamiliar with navigating the United States’ intricate tax landscape.
Residential distributed energy resources, especially EVs and in-home batteries, could make up for the expected growth in peak energy demand by 2035, and at a lower cost than building new infrastructure, according to a new report by Deloitte. Utilities can employ social media, data analytics and other related technologies to improve communication with residential customers and create DER programs tailored to more specific customer segments.
A municipal utility near Sacramento, California has deployed more than 120,000 smart meters as part of a multi-year improvement project. Roseville Utilities said the effort was completed three months ahead of schedule. The meters will support residential and customer engagement by the city’s electric and water utilities. The meter upgrade uses advanced metering infrastructure and introduces a two-way communication system for electric and water meters.
Californians have a tough set of choices to make on home decarbonization. They could install rooftop solar. But that’s much less valuable than it used to be for most Californians. They could also replace their fossil-gas-fueled heating and appliances with all-electric systems to cut their carbon and methane emissions. But that would boost their use of grid power in a state with sky-high and still-rising electricity rates.
