March 4
Duke Installs More Than 600 EV Chargers in Florida
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
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Duke Energy Florida recently completed its Park & Plug pilot program, installing 627 electric vehicle (EV) charging stations in public spaces and on thoroughfares in Florida. Duke Energy Florida launched the Park & Plug pilot program in 2018 to expand access to EV charging stations as part of an agreement with the Florida Public Service Commission.
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Tennessee Valley Authority announced that they have signed a new memorandum of understanding to work together on decarbonization technologies. The partnership will help TVA work toward the goal of net-zero carbon emissions. Under the agreement, the partners will explore capturing carbon directly from the air and converting carbon dioxide into valuable products.
The Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA) has released a new white paper outlining a framework for identifying high-impact actions to reduce carbon emissions. The paper, developed with input from industry leaders such as Xcel Energy, Microsoft and Google, outlines a five-step process for evaluating an organization's options for reducing carbon and selecting the actions that will have the greatest impact given organization-specific circumstances.
Orange & Rockland Utilities (O&R) added approximately 29 MW of customer solar power to its electric system in 2021. This is the second-largest annual increase of customer solar to O&R’s electric system in the past 10 years. Since 2001, O&R customers have completed more than 10,650 projects with the capacity to produce over 180 MW of electricity. These projects have eliminated the need for the production of 108,271 tons of carbon emissions.
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Industry News
Burlington, Vermont’s municipal electric utility is expanding a program that gives apartment renters more access to electric vehicle charging. Originally launched as a pilot in 2019, the program gives apartment building owners a financial incentive to install chargers and make them available to the public. The chargers use a software called EVmatch, which drivers can access through a smartphone app to reserve and pay for charging times.
Exelon Corporation is urging Congress to fund the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) at the highest level possible. The federal investment is necessary to help meet the home heating and cooling needs of more than six million American households that are struggling financially, Exelon officials said. Exelon’s utilities connected more than 650,000 customers to $430 million in energy assistance, including LIHEAP funding.
On a visit to Denver last week, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg stood in front of an EV charger at the Denver Housing Authority's Mariposa Apartments to tout a plan for moving the country “from the days of electric vehicles being a rare, luxury item and working to make them affordable and accessible for all.” Using CARES Act funding, Denver installed stations for EV car-sharing vehicles and EV chargers at the apartment complex and five other sites the city described as "under-resourced".
Bill Burke, CEO of Virtual Peaker, has spent the past 15 years figuring out how to turn everyday household devices like thermostats and water heaters – and less-everyday devices like batteries and EVs – into the building blocks of a flexible and responsive electric grid. That work started when he was a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley, where he helped develop some of the world’s first programmable communicating thermostats.
