March 15
Ameren Outlines Plans for More Clean Energy
Top consumer smart grid news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
Ameren recently outlined the steps the company is taking to provide affordable energy in an environmentally responsible manner to customers in a new report. The report, Building a Cleaner Energy Future, details Ameren’s strategy for balancing key climate risks with customer costs and reliability. Specifically, it outlines how Ameren is moving toward cleaner energy to achieve a goal of an 80 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050, as compared to 2005 levels.
What will neighborhoods look like as distributed energy resources and grid-responsive technologies become standard in new homes? Chances are they'll look something like Reynolds Landing, a suburban community outside of Birmingham, Alabama. Southern Company, EPRI and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have teamed up with homebuilder Signature Homes and equipment vendors such as Carrier, Rheem and Vivint to design an energy-efficient, connected neighborhood at Reynolds Landing, with 62 single-family homes supported by a one-megawatt microgrid.
SECC has released an Electric Vehicles Toolkit, which utilities can utilize to educate their customers on the coming wave of EVs. In 2018, EV sales grew 81 percent over 2017 to reach more than 360,000 EV sales, compared with under 20,000 in total EV sales in 2011. At the same time, leading automakers, including Audi, GM and Ford, have announced a flurry of new EV models for the years ahead, leading many analysts to forecast that EV sales will experience even higher growth rates in the coming years.
AEP launched the latest utility contest for startups with technologies that could help solve its various future grid challenges, with the potential for investment and real-world deployments as the prize. Through April 7, AEP’s IlluminationLab program is taking applications from startups with solutions in four key technology categories: customer experience, grid optimization, electric mobility, efficiency, and operations and maintenance, plus a “wildcard” category for unexpected entries.
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Industry News
Utilities continue to struggle to get digital right according to the J.D. Power 2019 Utility Digital Experience Study, released recently. There is an improvement in overall satisfaction from last year, but although utilities still lag behind other industries when it comes to delivering a satisfying digital customer experience, there remains a path forward for them to further improve.
The New Mexico State House recently passed Senate Bill 489 44-22, requiring the state to generate 100 percent of its electricity from carbon-free resources by 2045. The Energy Transition Act, introduced in February and approved by the State Senate last week, also increases the state's renewable portfolio standard to 50 percent by 2030 and 80 percent by 2040, echoing Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham's campaign promises.
The U.S. energy storage market deployed 310.5 megawatts in 2018, an increase of 44 percent from 2017, according to a new report from Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables and the Energy Storage Association. According to the report, which includes storage deployment data for 2018 and the first quarter of 2019, front-of-the-meter deployments were light in the first half of 2018 but rebounded in the second half thanks to several large projects in California, Hawaii and Texas deployed in the fourth quarter.
FPL filed plans for what would be the largest community solar project in the country to state regulators recently. FPL's SolarTogether project would consist of 20 solar installations totaling 1,490 MW built over the next two years, pending approval from the Florida Public Service Commission.
