October 3
Xcel Energy Rolls Out EV Programs in New Mexico
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
Xcel Energy is introducing several electric vehicle (EV) programs to its New Mexico customers. The programs are designed to make EV ownership and infrastructure development more accessible, cost-effective and impactful for residents and businesses. The launch follows the recent approval of the state’s Transportation Electrification Plan (TEP).
In January, EY released its Outlook 2025: Four Themes Empowering Utilities report. As the name implies, the report looks at themes challenging electric utilities, namely balancing the increased demand driven by rapid AI and data center developments, supply chain and tariff challenges, and increased extreme volatile weather events with utility customer satisfaction.
Texas public power utility CPS Energy on Sept. 30 announced the beginning of operations of Padua 1, a 50-megawatt, two-hour duration Battery Energy Storage System in Bexar County. This project advances the utility’s Vision 2027 strategy, which emphasizes delivering reliable, resilient and cleaner energy solutions to meet the needs of San Antonio’s growing population.
Ameren Illinois is installing new smart switches in Vermilion County. The 69kV Viper-HV reclosers, also known as smart switches, are the latest step by Ameren Illinois to modernize the electric grid and improve reliability. The smart switches detect problems on the electric system and help determine whether power should be re-routed from another source.
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Industry News
The U.S. is a nation of air-conditioned houses, and this ubiquitous cooling machinery drives an outsize chunk of the country’s electrical demand, especially during heat waves. Now, as utilities scramble to meet even more power demand for AI computing, legacy air-conditioning giant Carrier has launched a new business venture to make regular old HVAC equipment part of the solution.
In partnership with BGE, Sunrun has activated the nation’s first residential vehicle-to-grid distributed power plant. The pilot program dispatches energy from customers’ all-electric Ford F-150 Lightning trucks to the grid during periods of peak demand through the fall. The BGE and Sunrun partnership launched in summer 2024 with vehicle-to-home capability.
In the early 2000s, U.S. utilities began replacing analog electricity meters with so-called smart meters, which communicate with utilities wirelessly. This advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) enables a range of utility benefits, from automated meter reading to outage detection and more efficient power restoration. AMI grew nationwide after 2009, thanks to federal funding through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Utility-scale battery energy storage deployments hit 4.9 GW/15 GWh during the April to June quarter, rising 63 percent year over year and smashing the second-quarter record set in 2024, Wood Mackenzie and the ACP said. Total U.S. energy deployments across the utility, residential and commercial and industrial segments hit 5.6 GW/17.8 GWh, a record for any quarter.
