September 13
Powerley, Oracle Seek to Bolster Customer Energy Savings
Top consumer smart grid news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
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Powerley and Oracle Utilities Opower announced this week that they would collaborate to aid customers in successfully navigating from energy awareness to energy savings automation. Officials said combining Powerley’s Smart Home Energy Management platform with the Oracle Utilities Opower Customer Engagement Platform enables utilities to upgrade their digital customer experience with real-time, behind-the-meter customer engagement and lead customers to create smarter, more efficient homes.
Even a drastic uptick in renewable electricity has the globe on course for about 2.4°C of warming, according to a new analysis from DNV GL. The takeaways, while a slight variation on other scenarios of how a global energy transition may unfold, affirm what others have forecasted: The world is dangerously far from averting serious climate change.
Xcel Energy selected Mortenson to construct the 500-megawatt Cheyenne Ridge Wind Project, located in Cheyenne and Kit Carson counties in Colorado. Vestas will be supplying 225-V120 turbines and 25-V110 turbines for the project, which is slated for completion in December 2020. The new wind project aligns with Colorado Gov. Jared Polis’ plan for the state to use 100 percent renewable electricity by 2040.
Con Edison’s choice engine platform – powered by Enervee – has logged over 2.8 million visits, helping New Yorkers make better energy-related buying decisions. In line with fundamental tenets of NY’s signature policy initiative, Reforming the Energy Vision – most notably, empowering New Yorkers to make more informed energy choices – Con Edison is committed to making markets work better for customers and teamed up with Enervee back in 2016.
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Industry News
Distributed energy resources is an expansive term, including everything from backup generators to microgrids. In some states with 100 percent clean energy mandates, like California and Hawaii, the focus is on solar — lots and lots of it — and the tools needed to integrate this massive new grid edge resource. Batteries are another important tool in the kit, but so are air conditioners, water heaters, refrigerators, pumps and other behind-the-meter flexible loads — not to mention electric vehicles.
Within a decade, there may be more distributed energy resources coming onto distribution systems than any utility control room can manage. An autonomous energy grid could optimize those high levels of DER for the benefit of power system and DER owners, research under development by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory shows.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Board of Commissioners recently unanimously voted to approve power purchase agreements for the Eland Solar and Storage Center. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s office said the project includes a fixed cost of less than 2 cents per kilowatt hours for solar power, the lowest price offered in U.S. history will be the largest solar and battery energy storage system in the U.S.
Coming off record storage installations in the first quarter of 2019, the U.S. market slowed substantially in Q2, although the long-term picture remains unchanged. After delivering an all-time best of 149 megawatts in Q1, deployments dropped almost in half to 76 megawatts in the subsequent quarter. Slow activity in the utility-scale and commercial and industrial markets hampered growth. At the same time, the residential market had its best quarter ever.
