March 19
SnoPUD to Use DERMS in Residential Pilots
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
Snohomish County PUD (SnoPUD) said that it is partnering with Virtual Peaker Inc., a cloud-based energy management platform, to deploy a variety of pilot programs that will incentivize customers to change their behavior or employ home technology in an effort to shift energy usage. SnoPUD’s FlexEnergy pilots will be open to nearly all residential customers and will employ different methods to allow customers to save money and energy. The pilots are scheduled to launch in spring 2021.
A collective of utilities dedicated to expanding the network of EV charging stations throughout the Midwest gained four new members this week: Duke Energy, MidAmerican, Liberty and Midwest Energy. Led by Ameren, the collective was first established last year and consisted of six utilities up until now. Its creation was in response to automotive industry expectations that foresee EV adoption growing from 1.5 million vehicles to 18.7 million vehicles by 2030.
ComEd is providing residential and small-business customers with personalized reliability reports with their March bills. This effort is part of ComEd’s attempt to meet customers’ energy needs and show the impact ComEd’s energy investments have had on electric service. This is the first year small-business customers with a single location and the third consecutive year residential customers will receive the reports.
For the final publication in a series on lower-income energy consumers, the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative recently delved into survey responses from 1,000 consumers from across the United States to investigate differences between lower-income Black, People of Color (POC) and White consumers when it comes to smart energy, climate change, the provider-customer relationship and more. Due to historic racial inequalities in American life, we wanted to see if these inequalities were also present in the electric utility sector.
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Industry News
Solar deployment in the U.S. reached a record 19.2 GW of solar capacity last year, a volume expected to quadruple by 2030, according to the U.S. Solar Market Insight Report released by the Solar Energy Industries Association and Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables on Tuesday. Residential solar deployment, initially impacted by the pandemic, reached a record 3.1 GW in 2020, up 11 percent from 2019.
Avista Utilities says it is continuously recording financial benefits from a five-year smart meter rollout program deployed in partnership with smart grid solution provider Itron. During a pre-recorded session at the virtual Itron Utility Week for smart city and utility leaders in Europe, Middle East and Africa, the utility said it is expecting to record up to $221 million in benefits from its smart meter project by June 2021.
When your job involves occasionally illustrating the collapse of companies with a stock image of a skull, there’s a risk that, one day, the skull comes for you. That day arrived last month, instantly changing us journalists from the chroniclers of corporate demise to the chronicled. The outpouring from long-time readers got me thinking about what it was about Greentech Media that forged such an emotional bond over such wonky subject matter.
A pioneer in Minnesota’s solar industry is attempting to replicate a green economic justice blueprint in the state’s largest African American community. Ralph Jacobson founded the solar firm Impact Power Solutions in 1991 and was its CEO until 2019, when he shifted into a role focused on justice, equity, diversity and inclusion. Jacobson, who is White, has been working with the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians for a few years on a crowdfunded solar, microgrid and jobs training project in northern Minnesota.
