September 25
Bidgely Launches Energy Industry’s First Agentic AI Customer Experience Suite
This week's top smart energy news, curated by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative (SECC).
Member News
Bidgely announced the launch of Agentic CX, the industry’s first agentic AI customer experience suite purpose-built for energy providers to close the growing trust, knowledge and affordability gap between utilities and the customers they serve. Trained on more than a decade of behind-the-meter data, five specialized UtilityAI™ agents power Bidgely’s Agentic CX to deliver instant, appliance-level answers across chat, IVR and customer service representatives.
For the last century, utilities relied on infrastructure investment to improve reliability and resilience, but the operating environment has changed. And the scale of investment ahead is significant. Deloitte estimates that the U.S. power sector could invest as much as $1.4 trillion between 2025-2030, roughly equivalent to what the industry spent over the previous 12 years.
GridX announced its role in supporting the delivery of electricity usage information to residential electric customers of Southern California Edison (SCE). SCE customers with an iPhone, iPad, Mac or an Apple Watch running software version 27 can now use the Home app to access, understand and make informed decisions about their electricity usage.
Georgia Power’s Robins Battery Facility, a 128-MW battery energy storage system (BESS) located near Warner Robins, went into commercial operations. The facility can deliver stored energy to the grid for up to four hours, enhancing grid reliability and flexibility. The battery energy storage facility captures renewable energy during periods of lower customer demand and stores it for use when demand is higher, such as on cold winter mornings or during peak energy use.
Get Your Weekly Edition
Industry News
A new survey from National Grid Partners revealed that utilities are increasingly deploying artificial intelligence (AI) to manage rising power demand from AI data centers. National Grid Partners’ third annual Utility Innovation Survey found that 74% of utility innovation leaders say that AI-driven data center load growth is impacting grid reliability.
Don’t look now, but DERs can keep the lights on in California. Sunrun and Tesla just reported the largest-ever distributed virtual power plant dispatch event on the evening of September 9, 2026, when the companies’ fleets of home batteries sent more than 580 MW of power to California’s grid. That’s enough capacity to power all households in Sacramento County during peak hours.
Energy storage systems supplied 13%-19% of total generation at capacity factors, on par with gas-fired peaker plants when supply was at its tightest on California’s grid in 2024, avoiding more than $29 million in peak energy costs, RMI said in an analysis. The following year, energy storage systems supplied 6%-9% of generation during the ERCOT grid’s tightest hours.
Winter savings are in store for more than 65,000 Massachusetts households as two electric utilities slash their rates for heat pump owners below last year’s already discounted prices. Last winter, Massachusetts became the first state to require major utilities to offer a lower seasonal rate for all the electricity used by households with heat pumps, highly efficient systems that can both heat and cool spaces and are essential to weaning buildings off fossil-fueled furnaces.
