October 30
Austin Energy Increases Value of Solar Rate
This week's top smart energy news, curated by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative (SECC).
Member News
Effective October 1, Texas public power utility Austin Energy increased the Value of Solar rate by 27%, adding hundreds of dollars in potential annual solar bill credits to participating customers. The Value of Solar rate is the bill credit customers receive for energy generated by their on-site solar systems and supplied to the electric grid.
The Missouri Public Service Commission (PSC) approved Ameren Missouri’s plans to build three battery energy storage facilities, acquire two solar developments and construct a new switching station to connect a battery storage project to the transmission system. The projects are intended to support electric grid reliability and provide energy during periods of high demand.
Smart water heaters represent an underused opportunity for use in demand flexibility programs. Since water heater tanks store heat for hours, utilities can shift their load away from peak periods without customers noticing. Because nearly every home has one, small per-device flexibility adds up to meaningful capacity at scale. That’s why water heaters deserve more than a line item in a utility’s DER portfolio.
Rising electricity prices are no longer just an industry concern. For many households across the country, higher energy bills are tightening budgets and forcing them to make difficult choices about how to pay for essential needs. According to the North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center, the national average price of residential electricity increased by over 7% from April 2025 to April 2026, and PowerLines has shown that billions of dollars of rate increases are still on the horizon.
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Industry News
This week, I’m going to be talking about virtual power plants again – but not the ones set up by utilities and tech giants or run by solar-battery vendors like Sunrun and Tesla. Instead, I want to dive into a pretty radical new concept: letting participating households design VPPs themselves. On Wednesday, the Agile Electrification Project launched a new phase of research on a potentially groundbreaking project meant to do just that.
The pitch for residential virtual power plants in the data center era is straightforward: Home batteries, smart thermostats, heat pumps and EV chargers can be deployed in a matter of months, and if you deploy thousands of them, they offer firm capacity. Residential aggregators are quick to highlight just how much potential capacity is already out there.
There is sufficient available capacity on the U.S. electric grid for 86 million additional home heat pumps to operate – and adding them could reduce residential electric rates by an average of 13% in summer-peaking states, according to new research from RMI. There are about 23 million heat pumps operating in the United States today; expanding that almost five-fold with a mix of all-electric and hybrid heat pumps could save $15.6 billion per year – or $200 annually per customer.
Word is getting out about electric induction ranges. More and more chefs say the appliances cook just as well as or better than their gas counterparts. The stoves don’t burn climate-warming fossil fuels or release harmful indoor air pollutants like gas ones do. And because they’re vastly more efficient, they also reduce monthly energy bills.
