Customers of PG&E or SCE shopping for a new vehicle could save more than $20,000 off the cost of a new 2017 or 2018 BMW i3 or i3s electric vehicle, when a hefty discount associated with the utility is combined with other state and federal incentives. PG&E announced this month that customers could use a $10,000 discount on the electric BMWs through May 31, in addition to two years of free charging at some locations. SoCal Edison announced much the same discount in February.

GE has launched an energy storage platform and says its first order, for a 20 MW, 80 MWh project, will be deployed late next year. GE’s Reservoir storage platform is based on a 1.2 MW, 4 MWh modular unit the size of a shipping container. By using its proprietary Battery Blade design, GE says its Reservoir platform can deliver a 15 percent improvement in battery lifecycle, five percent higher efficiency and reduced installation time and costs.

The Illinois Commerce Commission on Feb. 28 approved ComEd’s request to construct a full-sized, utility-scale microgrid in Bronzeville, a community located on Chicago’s South Side. As proposed, the Bronzeville Community Microgrid will interconnect with an existing, fully functional microgrid at neighboring Illinois Institute of Technology, creating one of the first microgrid clusters in the U.S.

There’s been talk for years of an Amazon, Apple or Google emerging in the American energy industry -- a company that offers consumers a seamless solution for their energy needs, combined with choice, control and access to their own energy-generating potential. But that concept has yet to become a reality.

The delivery of electricity from central power plants to customers changed the world and now the world is changing again because customers can make and manage their own electricity with distributed energy resources. Flattened or falling electricity sales, partly due to DER, initially inspired visions of a “death spiral” for the utility businesses that deliver power.

The U.S. energy storage market is no longer in its infancy. 100 megawatt-hours of grid-connected energy storage were deployed in the fourth quarter of the year, marking 1,080 cumulative megawatt-hours deployed between 2013 and 2017. Even more impressive, GTM Research expects that the U.S. market will almost double this total in 2018 alone.