March 14
ComEd Offering $100 Million in Rebates to Drive EV Growth
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
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Chicago-based ComEd is offering $100 million in rebates to reduce the costs of installing electric vehicle charging hubs in homes, businesses and public sites around northern Illinois, the power company announced. The rebate program is part of a broader statewide initiative to promote widespread adoption of electric vehicles and get one million EVs on Illinois roads by 2030.
Smart tech company Itron and its channel partner, National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative (NTRC), are working with Arkansas Valley Electric Cooperative Corporation (AVECC) to improve grid resiliency and reliability for AVECC’s members across the Arkansas River Valley. AVECC is leveraging its existing fiber optic network to unlock a broad range of applications at the grid edge.
In 2024, ComEd delivered energy savings of approximately 100,000 MWh to customers through voltage optimization (VO), a form of energy efficiency enhancing the operation of appliances and equipment, resulting in reduced energy consumption and lower electricity bills. The energy savings were equivalent to avoiding more than 33,000 metric tons of CO2 or powering more than 11,500 ComEd customer homes for one year.
Uplight, a clean energy technology company that enables utilities and their customers to conserve, manage, deploy and monetize energy capacity, announced its partnership with San José Clean Energy to expand the utility’s demand response (DR) program. Uplight will enable San José Clean Energy to enroll a total of 25 MW of dispatchable capacity by 2028, and 5 MW by the end of summer 2025.
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Industry News
Last year was fantastic for battery storage. This year is poised to be even better. The U.S. is set to plug over 18 gigawatts of new utility-scale energy storage capacity into the grid in 2025, up from 2024’s record-setting total of almost 11 GW, per Energy Information Administration data analyzed by Cleanview. Should that expectation bear out, the U.S. will have installed more grid batteries this year alone than it had installed altogether as of 2023.
In 10 years leading Grid Forward, I’ve witnessed utilities and energy organizations advancing today’s defining grid technologies, business models and markets. Some innovations such as artificial intelligence were almost unthinkable a decade ago. But for all the mind-bending progress, improving both energy affordability and reliability remains a stubborn challenge.
Utilities and system operators are discovering new ways for artificial intelligence and machine learning to help meet reliability threats in the face of growing loads, utilities and analysts say. There has been an “explosion into public consciousness of generative AI models,” according to a 2024 EPRI paper. The explosion has resulted in huge 2025 AI financial commitments like the $500 billion U.S. Stargate Project and the $206 billion European Union fund.
As winter turns to spring, Texas is setting new records with its nation-leading clean energy fleet. In just the first week of March, the ERCOT power grid that supplies nearly all of Texas set records for most wind production (28,470 MW), most solar production (24,818 MW), and greatest battery discharge (4,833 MW). Only two years ago, the most that batteries had ever injected into the ERCOT grid at once was 766 MW.
