May 28
SnoPUD Pilots to Incentivize Flexible Energy Usage
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
Washington State’s Snohomish County PUD has launched pilot programs that will incentivize customers to change their behavior or employ innovative technology and save energy when demand on the electrical grid is at its greatest, the PUD said on May 24. The PUD plans to use the pilots to study the effects of shifting energy usage so the utility can keep rates low and meet clean energy goals.
BGE rolled out four of its fastest electric vehicle chargers to date this week in Maryland, establishing 150+ kW capacity chargers capable of charging vehicles in moments for public use at the BWI cell phone lot in Baltimore. An additional six of these chargers will be rolled out at BWI’s Rideshare Lot shortly. All of these chargers are funded in part by a U.S. Department of Energy grant awarded last year.
Utility rate design may not be a riveting clean energy topic, but it is critical for aligning the financial incentives of utilities and their customers to decarbonize the grid. Time-of-use rates can encourage customers to match consumption to the ups and downs of renewable energy supply, and specialized rates for behind-the-meter batteries, EVs, community solar systems and microgrids are needed to optimize their grid value.
Thanks to approval from the Minnesota PUC last week, Xcel Energy will expand an EV pilot program to include charging stations at multi-unit housing complexes. In all, the program proposes to spend $4.4 million over three years to help these complexes and affordable housing options to provide EV charging to their occupants. Xcel anticipates this could lead to the installation of approximately 348 charging ports across 51 multi-dwelling units.
Get Your Weekly Edition
Industry News
California is changing its approach to energy efficiency, and on Thursday, the state’s Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) passed new rules to address benefits beyond economic energy savings and adopted a new “total system benefit” (TSB) metric to encourage conservation at high-value times and locations. With the decision, the PUC adopts a new approach to setting budgets for non-resource tranches of energy efficiency.
Can distributed energy resources be tapped to provide the power grid’s most critical balancing needs? Green Mountain Power says yes — and it has the real-world experience to prove it. Last week, the Vermont utility unveiled a project that’s tapping the second-by-second responsiveness of 200 Tesla Powerwall batteries installed in its customers’ homes to provide up to 1 megawatt of frequency regulation service to grid operator ISO New England.
Sandia National Laboratories has released a software tool designed to help utilities and utility customers assess the economic value of installing an energy storage system. The software suite, known as Quest, currently has two principal tools: a behind-the-meter tool for businesses or organizations such as schools and hospitals and a market-analysis tool to help utilities assess how much revenue an energy storage system would generate.
LG Electronics announced a collaboration with Sense, provider of home energy monitors for consumers, to deliver to LG residential solar customers detailed, real-time data on their homes’ solar generation and power usage down to the appliance level using the Sense Solar Home Energy Monitor. Consumers have little visibility into their day-to-day electricity consumption and how using various appliances can influence their bills.
