May 12
Utility Innovation and Customer Engagement Successes
Top consumer smart grid news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
The landscape for customer engagement for energy providers has changed quickly over the last few years. Younger generations with different sets of values are emerging as increasingly important target demographics. The proliferation of smartphones, social media and mobile apps is creating new channels where some customers expect interaction. And customers’ experiences with companies like Amazon, Verizon and Lyft are influencing these customers’ expectations for their relationship with their electric provider.
ComEd and the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus signed a MOU that will support the study and development of new energy efficiency programs, smart streetlights, and community and residential solar and other infrastructure projects. The memo provides for a collaboration between ComEd and the MMC to develop a pilot for a national model on how utilities and municipalities can work together to create greener, more resilient and sustainable communities.
AutoGrid has a new challenge -- integrating three unique state programs into a single interface. That’s what National Grid, the utility serving more than 7 million customers across New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, has hired it to do. Over the course of the next 12 months or so, the grid analytics startup will implement its “flexibility management” software to manage about 400 megawatts of demand response.
Steve Bolze, President and CEO of GE Power, likes to talk about his company as "a 125-year-old startup" — one that has had to constantly evolve and innovate. According to Bolze, 30 percent of the world’s electricity now comes from GE technology, and the company services 40 percent of the world’s electricity — which means they may be working on equipment that is not their own.
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Industry News
Utility-scale solar installations grew at an average rate of 72 percent per year between 2010 and 2016, faster than any other generating technologies and included both photovoltaic and thermal technologies, EIA noted in its latest “Today in Energy” report.
There are about 6,200 electric vehicles on the roads in Massachusetts, but in less than a decade the state wants to reach 300,000. That means by 2025, the Bay State is targeting about a 50-fold increase in zero-emission vehicles. The transportation sector makes up 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the state, and the state's Zero Electric Vehicle Commission set the target to help Massachusetts meet its environmental goal of reducing emissions 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, and 80 percent by 2050.
While low gas prices have created a challenging environment for electric vehicles, year-over-year increases across nearly two dozen different EV models in all major metropolitan areas of the U.S. illustrate an obvious growth in electric consumption. But it raises a pressing question for utilities and cities that want to stay ahead of the growth curve: Is our infrastructure ready to accommodate citizens’ growing interest in EV transportation?
The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center has launched a community microgrids program that seeks to “catalyze the development of community microgrids throughout Massachusetts to lower customer energy costs, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and provide increased energy resilience.”
