November 12
Georgia Power Seeks More Than 1,000 MW of Renewable Generation by 2025
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
In its latest draft Request for Proposals, Georgia Power announced that it would seek 1,030 MW of new utility-scale renewable resources to be brought online in 2023 and 2025. Through a competitive bidding process to open in the first quarter of 2022, the company will pursue its second utility-scale renewable solicitation linked to its 2019 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP). That IRP should lead to 2,000 MW of procured, utility-scale renewables.
In a year since launching its Net Zero Plan, National Grid has made strides in its efforts to improve energy efficiency, integrate clean energy resources and reduce carbon emissions across the company’s footprint. The details have been documented in the first annual National Grid Net Zero Plan Update report.
The Duette Solar Power Plant in Manatee County, Florida, owned by Duke Energy Florida, is now operational, the company announced this week. The Duette facility, located on 520 acres, was placed in service on October 25, some seven weeks ahead of schedule, as the project team performed more than 175,000 safe work hours to finish it. The 74.5-MW facility includes approximately 227,000 single-axis tracking solar panels, capable of producing enough electricity to power approximately 23,000 homes annually at peak production.
The new BlastPoint-sponsored Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative report, Understanding the Needs and Wants of Renters, shines a spotlight on this key customer demographic. The report reveals that renters care more than the average customer about saving energy and the planet, but that very few of them are actually aware of their energy providers’ energy efficiency programs. Understanding renters within a utility’s footprint helps to identify and target them with relevant programs that make a measurable impact.
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Industry News
According to the recently released U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) Annual Electric Power Industry Report, electricity customers in the states experienced on average just over eight hours of electric power interruptions in 2020, the most since the organization began collecting electricity reliability data in 2013. The average U.S. electricity customer experienced nearly 20 more minutes of power interruptions in 2020 than in 2017, the year with second-longest duration of interruptions.
The passage of the sprawling and long-awaited Biden infrastructure package is seen as a milestone in the impending electrification of the nation’s transportation sector, panelists said over the weekend at the COP26 climate summit in Scotland. The wrangling in Congress over the $1.2 trillion spending plan came to an end and gave President Joe Biden his most concrete achievement in the campaign to curb climate change at a time when the COP26 conference was being dismissed in some quarters as too little and possibly too late.
Electric vehicles, including battery electric and plug-in hybrids, made up 7.2 percent of global car sales in the first half of 2021, up from 2.6 percent in 2019 and 4.3 percent in 2020, according to new data from BloombergNEF. In North America, EVs made up three percent of sales in the first half, but industry observers say five percent is possible as second half sales pick up. News of higher EV sales came alongside a commitment from General Motors, Ford and other automakers for all new car sales to be zero emission by 2040.
By 2050, if all of the climate-change related pledges and regulations take effect as currently planned, we should be living in a clean-energy powered world with a fully carbon-free electricity system powering fully electrified transportation, industrial and building sectors. But we certainly have much to do to put all of that in place. Indeed, we are arguably amidst the greatest energy transition of all time.
