March 30
March 30: Duke Outlines Plan for More Clean Energy
Top consumer smart grid news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
Duke Energy outlined the steps this week it will take to provide affordable and increasingly clean energy to its customers into the future. In a new report, Duke Energy discussed initiatives to mitigate risks from climate change, reduce emissions, navigate policy uncertainty and plan future investments.
Itron and sonnen recently announced they have integrated their respective products to create a residential battery system that will store and discharge energy to keep electric bills low and maximize the use of solar energy. The completed product will utilize the "sonnenBatterie eco" of which there are 30,000 installed worldwide.
The California ISO has approved PG&E's plan to utilize clean energy resources to allow an older jet fuel generator on its system to retire. The utility says its Oakland Clean Energy Initiative will be the first time that local clean-energy resources were "proactively deployed as an alternative to fossil-fuel generation" for transmission reliability in PG&E's service area.
U.S. consumers want cleaner energy sources, and many, particularly millennials, are willing to pay a premium to access renewable energy from their electricity providers, according to the “2018 State of the Consumer” report from SECC. This theme is one of six in the latest edition of SECC’s yearly report that synthesizes the prior year’s research into key takeaways on today’s energy consumers for electricity providers and other stakeholders.
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Industry News
Elon Musk set a record with his massive South Australia battery last year. Now it's a target for another ambitious billionaire. British businessman Sanjeev Gupta plans to build a 120-megawatt/140-megawatt-hour battery complex in the same region where Tesla completed its 100-megawatt/129-megawatt-hour system late last year.
When John Caldwell of EEI began a microgrid task force a few years ago, the utilities that joined saw no need to meet more than annually. Now they want to meet monthly, reflecting what Caldwell sees as exponential growth in utility microgrids. “Active utility involvement in terms of partnering was probably less than 10 percent in 2014. As of mid-2017, it was 40 percent,” said Caldwell.
Green Mountain Power has announced a new DR initiative to help ensure grid reliability during peak periods. Green Mountain Power launched the BYOD program in which the energy provider aims to improve consumer energy efficiency savings. The BYOD program includes the integration of energy stored on onsite consumer battery storage systems onto the main grid during times when demand is high.
Energy experts and consumer groups are monitoring the recent Illinois decision to allow ComEd to build a microgrid and recoup the $25 million cost from a broader group of ratepayers. But while a bill to authorize similar cost recovery is in motion in Pennsylvania, most observers plan to wait for details on how the Chicago microgrid performs before pushing similar regulatory changes.
