October 31
CPS Energy Launches New Version of Weatherization Rebate Program
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
CPS Energy has launched a new version of the Casa Verde Weatherization Rebate Program, designed to help income-qualified customers reduce their energy use and lower their monthly bills. The program introduces expanded contractor participation and gives customers more choices in how they receive services. The Casa Verde program has provided weatherization services to improve comfort and energy efficiency since 2009.
As residential electricity prices continue to climb across the United States, about half (48 percent) of low-income households report struggling to pay their electric bills, according to a new paper from the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative (SECC), a nonprofit organization that studies Americans’ energy-related behaviors, interests and values.
What does it mean to embed intelligence at the edge of the grid? And how can doing so tangibly improve internal processes and meet changing external expectations for today’s utilities? These are simple questions with countless answers that dominated conversations across the first day of Itron Inspire. The annual event kicked off on October 27 in Orlando and was designed to provide attendees with ideas and strategies that allow them to explore these questions.
California public power utility SMUD has been implementing AI to advance both its customer service and internal business management. In a conversation with APPA, SMUD Director of AI Oliver Daniels III and Director of Specialized Enterprise Initiatives Michael Champ detailed how the utility is exploring use cases that have enabled a newfound level of process efficiency.
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Industry News
CEOs of AI companies want to spend hundreds of billions of dollars building their energy-gobbling data centers, but that can’t happen without the necessary electricity supply. And they want to move way faster than electric utilities are used to. One idea gaining traction is to allow data centers to come online more quickly if they agree to occasionally pull less power from the grid when demand is high.
The retail price of electricity for residential customers was up 6.1 percent in August over the same month last year, reaching an average of 17.62 cents/kWh, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s monthly update on electricity. Total net generation and retail sales were down slightly, by 0.8 and 0.5 percent, respectively, which experts attributed to a mild summer in much of the eastern part of the country.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) is meeting an increase in energy demand through the use of renewable energy sources. Since 2021, EIA said electricity demand on ERCOT’s grid, which manages about 90 percent of the state’s load, has increased. In the first nine months of 2025, ERCOT had the fastest electricity demand growth among U.S. electricity grids.
The overwhelming majority of utilities see artificial intelligence as a strategic focus and 42 percent plan targeted AI deployments over the next two years, according to a National Grid Partners survey released earlier this month. Utilities see promise in AI use cases ranging from regulatory reporting and compliance to worker training and remote equipment monitoring, the survey found.
