November 1
Great River Energy Co-ops Tap On-Bill Financing
Top consumer smart grid news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
A group of Minnesota cooperatives is using on-bill financing programs to help shift electricity consumption to overnight hours. By powering customer appliances such as electric water heaters from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., cooperatives can take advantage of cheaper and often cleaner electricity widely available at night from wind farms. The savings is enough that utilities can offer no- or low-interest financing to customers for appliances and improvements to their homes that will pay for themselves in energy savings in just a few years, utilities say.
Utilities increasingly view DR as a flexible grid management tool rather than an emergency resource and are beginning to call on it more frequently, according to a Sept. 30 report focused on power sector load management programs. SEPA surveyed 190 utilities for this year's Demand Response Utility Market Snapshot, and reported enrolled capacity rose to 20.8 GW in 2018, up from 18.3 GW of capacity surveyed the year before.
Landis+Gyr has released its MDMS 4.2 with updates that enhance the performance of its meter data management system with other utility applications. The new MDMS version improves integration with Landis+Gyr's Command Center head-end software to increase the speed with which reads, intervals and events are processed, as well as providing improved integration of gas and water endpoints. Version 4.2 also continues to add business process automation tools to improve the efficiency of everyday utility operations which leads to increased customer satisfaction.
Ørsted U.S. Offshore Wind and PSEG announced recently the beginning of exclusive negotiations for the utility to become an equity investor in the New Jersey offshore Ocean Wind project. PSEG would acquire 25 percent of Ørsted's 1,100 MW project that earned a winning bid this June in the first of three solicitations by the state to secure 3.5 GW of offshore wind by 2030.
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Industry News
The U.S. has surpassed 100 gigawatts of wind capacity, a momentous milestone that comes as the industry girds its loins for a post-subsidy world. It was the largest third quarter on record for the U.S. wind market, with nearly 2 gigawatts built, according to the American Wind Energy Association, a performance powered in large part by the ongoing and dramatic onshore wind boom in Texas.
Massachusetts officials recently selected Mayflower Wind to provide the state with 804 MW of offshore wind capacity. The project will be located 20 miles south of Nantucket and is expected to begin operations in 2025. Once contracts are signed, Massachusetts will have procured the 1,600 MW of offshore capacity required by a 2016 state law. The state is considering adding more: in June the Department of Energy Resources recommended an additional 1,600 MW procurement.
Students at a downstate Illinois university will soon have a new opportunity to put their grid research into action. The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency recently announced it’s granting $900,000 to Southern Illinois University to help support a new solar-plus-storage project that includes a communications system with the ability to operate off-grid. The project will include a roughly 150 kW rooftop solar installation and a battery with about 310 kWh of storage capacity at the university’s engineering school.
The largest planned community solar program in the country, created by utility FPL, cleared a hurdle this month when the utility reached a settlement agreement with groups that had raised concerns about its structure. Solar accessibility advocates and retail giant Walmart now stand behind the 1.5-gigawatt program, after initially expressing concerns about access for low-income customers, overall costs and the distribution of the program’s financial benefits. The program, called SolarTogether, still requires final approval from state regulators, but FPL is planning to launch the program in the first quarter of 2020.
