May 30
ComEd Launches EV Ambassador Program in Northern Illinois
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
ComEd is launching a new program designed to expand education and awareness around EV adoption and benefits in northern Illinois. The EV Ambassador Program will launch with three local partner organizations: Equiticity, Bronzeville Community Development Partnership and A Step Beyond NFP. Through this program, EV Ambassadors will engage directly with residents and local businesses through community events, presentations and pop-up EV demonstrations.
DNV and SMUD excelled in load management through their innovative Residential Managed EV Charging Pilot, which employed a randomized control trial to evaluate solar consumption, system peak reduction and transformer overload mitigation. With around 1,200 EVs enrolled across four automakers, the interim evaluation revealed an estimated benefit of $60 per vehicle annually, mainly from avoided distribution overloads.
OCI Energy and Texas public power utility CPS Energy, along with LG Energy Solutions' U.S. energy storage division, LG Energy Solution Vertech, signed a Memorandum of Understanding to memorialize their collaboration on the Alamo City Battery Energy Storage System project. The joint effort “represents a significant advancement in grid strengthening infrastructure that will enhance energy security and reliability for residents and businesses in San Antonio, Texas.”
Con Edison said Wednesday it has made $2.35 billion in upgrades across the five boroughs of New York City and Westchester County, New York, since last summer to help ensure reliable, resilient service this summer. The utility said infrastructure upgrades to date include the installation of new substation equipment, 46 underground and 79 overhead transformers, 342 spans of underground and overhead feeder cables, 259 spans of open wire and 113 poles.
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Industry News
Brooke Canova was nervous after she and her husband bought their Ford F-150 Lightning, the electric version of the enormous, classic pickup truck. She wasn’t worried about running out of charge and being stranded on the road, or whether the truck would have enough oomph to merge onto a speeding highway. Canova, a health and physical education teacher and mother of a preteen son in Charlottesville, Virginia, fretted about the vehicle’s size.
Eversource will begin installing the first smart meters at customers’ homes and businesses in Western Massachusetts in late July and continue through the following months. The energy company will expand to Eastern Massachusetts in installing network devices, a technology extending the range of Eversource’s meter network and helping the smart meters safely and securely communicate important information back to the company.
The state of California has added 2,300 MW of energy storage since last September. This contributes to a total of 15,763 MW of battery storage capacity, which represents a 1,944-percent increase since the start of Gov. Newsom’s administration in 2019. Battery systems capture power produced by wind and solar resources and discharge the energy back to the electric grid during times of peak demand. Energy storage, and battery storage in particular, has become a key resource in the state’s energy transformation.
Despite challenges in key markets like the U.S., the global shift to battery-powered vehicles is moving along. Last year, more than one in five new cars sold worldwide were either fully electric or a plug-in hybrid vehicle (PHEV), according to a new International Energy Agency report. This year, EVs and PHEVs will make up more than one-quarter of new car sales, IEA forecasts.
