September 10
Great River Energy Sees Big Battery as Piece of Reliability Puzzle
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
The utility cooperative partnering with Form Energy on its first “iron air” battery project sees the long-duration energy storage technology as a potential buffer for its grid during extreme cold snaps like 2019’s polar vortex. Great River Energy, a Minnesota generation and transmission cooperative that serves 28 member utilities, had been in discussions with the Massachusetts startup company for several years before committing to the pilot project.
Last year, National Grid brought two customer energy management programs together: their behavioral efficiency program serving over 2.8 million customers, and their portfolio of dispatchable DERs, including residential bring-your-own thermostat (BYOT) and storage devices. In a first-of-its-kind test, National Grid learned a new way to boost customer interest in demand response and increase their pace of demand response program enrollment.
Duquesne Light Company has partnered with LineVision to install no-contact sensors on several transmission towers across its service territory. The pilot project, which began in July, uses real-time and forecasted dynamic line ratings to monitor transmission conductors and uncover additional grid capacity with the purpose of making service more resilient, efficient and affordable.
Duke Energy is eyeing an early retirement of its coal-fired plants by the end of the decade, according to the revised integrated resource plans (IRP) filed with South Carolina regulators Friday for its subsidiaries, Duke Energy Progress and Duke Energy Carolinas. Duke’s revised IRPs also call for adding 3,000 MW of solar energy and 600 MW of wind power over the next 15 years, compared to earlier proposals South Carolina’s Public Service Commission rejected in June.
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Industry News
The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) is projected to help some 1.2 million poor households pay their cooling bills this summer, shattering the record for the most families the program has helped annually, and leaping 46 percent over 2020 figures. The news was reported from the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA), which represents the state directors of the LIHEAP program.
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, as governments were scrambling to figure out how to protect both public health and the economy, Elizabeth Marx reached out to Pennsylvania authorities with a simple request: Keep everyone’s lights on. “We knew immediately, with people needing to stay home, we had to ensure that nobody would lose power or heat, even if they couldn’t afford to pay,” said Marx, Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Utility Law Project. “We’re talking about essential services.”
Jesse Morris, CEO of the Energy Web Foundation, believes that blockchain could increase the value of distributed solar, batteries and grid-responsive appliances and electric vehicles around the world. To prove that point, he's starting with a novel test in Australia. It’s called Project Energy Demand and Generation Exchange, or Project Edge.
Solar energy has the potential to supply up to 40 percent of the nation’s electricity within 15 years — a 10-fold increase over current solar output, but one that would require massive changes in U.S. policy and billions of dollars in federal investment to modernize the nation’s electric grid, a new federal report says. The U.S. installed a record 15 GW of solar generating capacity in 2020, and solar now represents just over three percent of the current electricity supply.
