May 17
SRP, SMUD Earn Recognition for Energy Storage, Equity
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
Arizona public power utility Salt River Project and California public power utility SMUD have earned 2024 Power Player Awards from the Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA). SRP and partner CMBlu Energy won in the Energy Storage Power Player category. SRP partnered with CMBlu Energy to launch the Desert Blume long-duration energy storage pilot at its Copper Crossing site in Florence, Arizona. SMUD’s Community Impact Plan project team earned the Energy Equity Power Player Award.
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the largest public power provider in America, recently completed its sustainability strategy that is designed to drive it from nearly 60 percent carbon-free energy toward net-zero emissions by 2050. With the region growing three times faster than the national average and population expected to grow 22 percent by 2050, TVA is poised to meet the challenges ahead.
Consumers Energy will invest nearly $24 million in smart technology this year to prevent power outages and keep the lights on for customers. Nearly 3,000 line sensors – the most that Consumers Energy has ever installed in a year – and over 100 automatic transfer reclosers (ATRs) are being deployed throughout Michigan. ATRs isolate outages by detecting power loss and automatically re-routing power in another direction.
Fifty-four percent of Americans who do not currently own an electric vehicle are interested in purchasing one in the future. However, 64 percent cite the purchase price as a significant barrier to ownership, according to the latest survey from the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative, a nonprofit organization that studies Americans’ energy-related behaviors, interests and values.
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Industry News
For the first year ever, renewable energy sources generated 30 percent of the globe’s electricity in 2023 – driven by a decade of consistent, spectacular growth in solar and wind power. This surge in clean generation helped slow the growth of fossil fuels by almost two-thirds over the last 10 years, according to energy analysis firm Ember’s Global Electricity Review 2024.
After almost half a century of endless pilots, utilities are permanently implementing time-of-use rates. After the passage of President Jimmy Carter’s Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act in 1978, utilities across the U.S. experimented with different pricing schemes for electricity throughout the 80s and 90s. But customers didn’t respond to the price signals, said Ahmad Faruqui, an economist and expert on rate design.
Renew Home, a residential virtual power plant (VPP) service, has launched out of the combination of Google’s Nest Renew service and OhmConnect, which the new company says brings together millions of customers across the nation. Renew already controls nearly 3 GW of electrical energy use and is planning to expand to 50 GW by 2030 – approximately 25 percent of the total VPP growth recently projected by the U.S. Department of Energy.
Planning on replacing your water heater in the next few years? You could find yourself in the midst of an appliance revolution: Heat pumps are set to soar in the world of water heating. In the U.S., about half of the roughly nine million water heaters sold each year use gas. The other half mostly rely on electric-resistance elements. These appliances are inefficient, expensive to operate and worse for the planet than the up-and-coming alternative, heat-pump water heaters.
