September 13
Jersey Central Power & Light Relaunches Popular EV Driven Program
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
Jersey Central Power & Light (JCP&L), a subsidiary of FirstEnergy, is relaunching its EV Driven residential electric vehicle charging incentives program. The relaunch comes after the popular program was maxed out with customer participation in 2023. JCP&L’s EV Driven program was established to provide incentives for electric vehicle charging infrastructure in the company’s service area.
The 20th-century formula for a reliable and functional grid depended upon the stability and predictability derived from designing generation and one-way power flow operations to meet peak customer demand requirements with limited customer interaction outside of responding to outages and billing questions.
Eugene Water & Electric Board customers who voluntarily chose to invest extra money in community-wide sustainability efforts cut carbon emissions by 730 metric tons in 2023, the Oregon public power utility said recently. Customers achieved those emissions reductions by voluntarily subscribing to EWEB’s Cleanpower, Greenpower and Carbon Offset programs.
Almost 90 percent of EV drivers are apt to purchase an EV for their next vehicle, and most consumers’ concerns about EVs decrease across the board once they lease or own an EV, according to a newly released consumer survey. Plug In America, the EV nonprofit, in collaboration with EPRI’s EVs2Scale2030 initiative, recently released findings from the 2024 EV Driver Annual Survey Report about EV drivers’ satisfaction with their vehicles.
Get Your Weekly Edition
Industry News
Perhaps the only thing harder than finding a spot to park a car in New York City is finding a spot to charge a car. EV owners in the city could soon get some relief on that second problem, thanks to a $15 million federal grant to build 600 curbside EV chargers – the largest network of its kind in the United States and a step toward the city’s goal of building 10,000 curbside chargers by 2030.
The U.S. energy storage sector marked its second strongest quarter on record in Q2 2024 with 2.9 GW of newly installed capacity, a 62-percent jump from Q2 2023, the American Clean Power Association said last Thursday in its latest clean power quarterly market report. Developers installed 11 GW of new utility-scale solar, storage and wind capacity in the second quarter, up 91 percent year over year.
As November’s election closes in, the Biden administration is working to push Inflation Reduction Act dollars out the door. The latest installment totals $7.3 billion in grants for clean energy projects for rural electric cooperatives, in what the administration is characterizing as the biggest investment in rural electrification since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Rooftop solar, backup batteries, electric vehicles and smart thermostats and appliances are all crucial to the energy transition in their own right. But if utilities are able to combine these distributed energy technologies together to form so-called virtual power plants, the result could be greater than the sum of its parts – and make the energy transition tens of billions of dollars cheaper.
