September 4
PSE&G Introduces Residential Battery Storage Pilot
This week's top smart energy news, curated by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative (SECC).
Member News
A pilot program from PSE&G will offer customers a $5,000 incentive toward home battery systems if they provide backup power to New Jersey’s grid. The GridSmart Battery Program will help residential customers offset the cost of buying and installing a home battery energy storage system, if the system provides backup power during scheduled GridSmart Battery Events.
Every hot summer day or cold winter morning, utilities watch the same number climb: system demand. Most of that demand is predictable. A small slice of it isn’t, and that unpredictable slice is where critical peaks live. Those critical peaks can challenge grid reliability, while potentially adding the high peak energy market costs that leads to increased operational or customer costs.
Omaha Public Power District is launching a new door-to-door outreach, bringing customer service directly to the homes of those who may need support with billing, payment options and financial assistance programs. Starting August 31, and for the next several weeks, two-person teams will visit selected customers’ homes to answer questions, help explain bills, offer support and connect them with financial assistance programs as needed.
Uplight and Octopus Energy Group announced Octopus Energy has closed its investment in Uplight. Uplight will continue to operate as an independent company, leveraging the strategic investment to build on its leadership in customer-centric flexibility management. The investment supports Uplight's next phase of growth, including a target of $1 billion in customer savings.
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Industry News
Last November, Jonathan Cohen needed a new water heater for the house he and his wife had recently purchased. The labor economist at Amazon was keen to get a heat pump water heater, a superefficient electric technology that could save him money on his utility bills. Thorough by nature, he emailed 12 plumbers to ask how much it would cost to install Wirecutter’s top pick.
Virtual power plant adoption has been slower than many in the industry once expected or hoped. Most distributed energy resources located in homes are small and not easily accessed and orchestrated, and convincing customers to use even those few kilowatts as grid resources can be a lift. But at least when it comes to distributed storage, interest among both utilities and state policymakers is finally growing.
On July 22, a transmission line failed in Northern Virginia. The fault was routine, the kind of disturbance the grid shrugs off constantly. But within seconds, roughly 3,100 MW of demand vanished as data centers switched to backup power. The voltage disturbance was felt from Washington to Chicago, though PJM reported no impact to bulk-system reliability.
There’s never been a better time to build energy storage in the U.S. than right now. Grid batteries – which sop up power when it’s abundant and discharge that energy when it’s needed – have been ascendant for a decade, as the price of the underlying lithium-ion cells fell precipitously. Bolstered by plummeting costs and increasing familiarity with the tech, developers started building bigger and in more parts of the country.
