March 20
Puget Sound Energy Tests V2H Technology
This week's top smart energy news, curated by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative (SECC).
Member News
Puget Sound Energy (PSE) has joined several partners to test new vehicle-to-home (V2H) technology that enables EVs to power homes during outages. PSE is using ChargeScape’s automaker-backed vehicle-grid integration platform that officially connects OEMs with utilities in a demonstration that it says will enable participants with bidirectional capable EVs to use the batteries as backup power sources.
Just north of Boston, the Trimount Battery Project is making big waves. The project is set to add 700 MW of power capacity and 2.8 GWh of stored energy, the largest in New England, in a bid to support grid resilience while mitigating market pressures. Considering that Boston uses an average of 12.3 billion kWh of power annually, the Trimount Project promises an opportunity for New England electric utilities.
Salt River Project (SRP), a public power utility serving the Phoenix metropolitan area, and Invenergy, North America’s largest privately held independent power producer and energy infrastructure developer, announced an agreement to add 200 MW of solar energy and 200 MW of 4-hour battery storage to the Valley’s grid. This agreement marks the first partnership between SRP and Invenergy.
Duke Energy’s Green Source Advantage Express clean energy program for large business customers in North Carolina has surpassed initial enrollment targets. The voluntary program allows non-residential customers to subscribe to capacity from new renewable energy facilities on Duke Energy’s grid. This helps them match up to 100% of their annual electricity use without securing off-site generation on their own.
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Industry News
Base Power just revealed how it’s spending some of the $1 billion it raised in October. The startup’s plan is to build one of the nation’s largest fleets of home batteries for a cooperative utility outside Dallas-Fort Worth. Cleantech startups and advocates alike keep promising that small-scale energy devices, such as residential batteries and thermostats, can be coordinated and operated like traditional power plants.
A new analysis from Wood Mackenzie suggests that growth in the U.S. data center development pipeline remains significant but is beginning to slow as developers contend with grid constraints, rising policy complexity and a shift toward executing existing projects rather than announcing new ones.
California and Texas are far ahead of the pack when it comes to grid batteries. But another state is seeing storage expand quickly as it looks to store more of its abundant, cheap solar power for later. Arizona saw blistering growth in utility-scale battery capacity last year, more than doubling its fleet to a total of 4.7 GW at the end of 2025.
Data centers are driving higher load growth in Texas and the PJM Interconnection region faster than in the rest of the country. That rapid growth could increase electricity prices and gas and coal consumption under some scenarios, the EIA said last week. The ERCOT and PJM Interconnection regions are forecast to see annual electricity load averages grow 10% and 3.2%, respectively, between 2025 and 2027.
