October 15
Uplight Expands Clean Energy Ecosystem for Utilities with Google
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
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Uplight is expanding opportunities in the clean energy ecosystem, enabling utilities to reach their objectives faster by leveraging the expertise of ecosystem partners in the grid edge, consumer channels, digital transformation channels and technology spaces. Through these partners, utilities can extend their reach by easily and more cost effectively surfacing energy offerings in third-party services such as smart home devices and related apps.
Georgia Power is going to build and operate the first standalone battery storage project on the state’s transmission grid. The Georgia Public Service Commission has approved plans for the Mossy Branch Battery Facility. The 65-MW/260-MWh grid-charging battery system will be sited on 2.5 acres in Talbot County near Columbus, Georgia. It will connect into the Georgia Integrated Transmission System and will be part of a larger future 80-MW battery energy storage portfolio already approved in Georgia Power’s 2019 integrated resource plan.
About one year ago, President Biden welcomed auto industry leaders to the White House for the announcement of a national goal for half of all new cars and trucks sold to be zero emissions by 2030. While largely a symbolic move, as the executive order is non-binding, it does accurately reflect the immense momentum that has been building within the electric vehicle (EV) industry over the past couple of years.
As California’s biggest electric-only utility, Southern California Edison has a clear interest in promoting vehicles and buildings switching from fossil fuels to low-carbon electricity. It also has a clear view of just how far the state has yet to go to reach its goals. Over the past four years, the five-million-customer utility has issued an increasingly pointed set of reports on the disconnects between current policy pathways and future targets.
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Industry News
When it comes to building virtual power plants — groupings of buildings with electricity loads that can be turned down or energy resources that can be turned up to respond to the moment-by-moment needs of the power grid — multiple technologies can add up to more than the sum of their parts. One example of this is the project that Clean Power Alliance is working on with VPP provider AutoGrid.
Global energy storage deployments will nearly triple in 2021 compared to last year, reaching 12 GW/28 GWh this year, according to a new report from Wood Mackenzie. The research group's Global Energy Storage Outlook says that decarbonization of the energy sectors in the U.S. and China will drive the need for a boom in storage deployments, with nearly 1 TWh in demand forecast from 2021-2030.
Most of the battery storage expected to come online in the next five years will be co-located with a solar power plants, according to the Energy Information Agency’s (EIA) most recent annual electric generator report. Of the 14.5 gigawatts (GW) of battery storage planned to begin come online between 2021 and 2024, 9.4 GW, or 63 percent, will be co-located with solar power.
According to compliance reports submitted to the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (PUC), renewable sources now account for 24.6 percent of Minnesota’s electric retail sales, and three of the state’s utilities have met the Minnesota Solar Energy Standard. That standard, part of the state’s Renewable Energy Standards (RES), requires electric and distribution utilities to retire Renewable Energy Credits representing at least 20 percent of annual retail sales for the year 2020.
