September 11
Duke Energy’s Demand Response Playbook
This week's top smart energy news, curated by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative (SECC).
Member News
Some people turn to YouTube to watch music videos, clips of their favorite television shows, or how-to videos. Brian Lusher turned to it for a different reason. Years ago, Brian started downloading academic lectures about the energy industry on YouTube, so he’d have something to listen to on long drives. At the time, he was a reliability engineer for an on-site power plant at a manufacturing facility.
PSE&G reported systemwide reliability results as New Jersey enters the peak of Atlantic hurricane season. The utility said ongoing projects to upgrade its electric and gas infrastructure are intended to improve system reliability, resiliency and capacity, while supporting preparedness for severe weather. PSE&G has received the ReliabilityOne Award for electric system reliability for 24 consecutive years.
The duck curve, the duck-shaped chart showing the difference between electricity demand and the amount of available photovoltaic solar available throughout the day, is no longer simply a regional curiosity. It’s showing up more often, in more places and with a steeper evening ramp than utilities budgeted for. Behind-the-meter DERs, including battery energy storage systems (BESS), are emerging as one of the most affordable ways to flatten that curve.
Consumers Energy is proposing a 20-year energy supply plan that combines natural gas, solar, wind and battery, and pumped storage as the utility seeks to meet Michigan’s rising energy needs. The company recently unveiled its Energy Supply Plan and filed it with the Michigan Public Service Commission, which is expected to act on it within the next year.
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Industry News
Peanut butter and jelly. Batman and Robin. Solar and storage. Some things just go together, and that’s why investors around the world are pouring more and more money into projects that pair rows of solar panels with boxes of grid batteries on the same site. Co-located renewable energy projects attracted a record $25 billion of investment in the first half of 2026.
PG&E is rolling out a VPP initiative that is designed to help communities benefit from rising electric demand, while improving affordability and reliability. The initiative, called Smart Home Assets for Reliability and Efficiency or SHARE, combines enrollment of existing home energy devices with regional deployment of privately funded new electrification technologies to address growing electric demand.
As the U.S. approaches the midterms – and both electricity prices and data center opposition are major voter priorities – whether data centers can actually offset utility bills and benefit local grids has become a key political talking point. At the same time, there’s been a dramatic uptick in the creation of large load tariffs at the state level designed to do exactly that.
Front-of-meter solar and storage could serve approximately 17.5 GW of summer peak load on the distribution substations owned by California’s three large investor-owned utilities, according to a study commissioned by the Coalition for Community Solar Access and conducted by Kevala. Those assets could offset about 32% of load between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. from June through September, when California typically sees its highest net power demand.
