September 29
Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative Names New Board Member
Top consumer smart grid news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
SECC said Wednesday it has named Allconnect’s Rob Caiello to its board of directors. Caiello, vice president of marketing and customer experience with the energy sales and marketing solutions firm, will serve a two-year term on the 17-member board.
If you are looking for a good deal on energy in Arizona, here's a hint: around lunchtime in the month of March, it's usually free. APS recently proposed a slate of efficiency and demand-side measures that include many of the usual suspects, along with new takes on traditional resources.
Clean energy advocates, utilities and policymakers frequently tout the benefits of energy efficiency and demand-side management. But driving utilities to invest in such programs at a meaningful scale is not easy in a marketplace where profits are still often largely driven by volume of sales.
New Mexico's largest electric utility wants to add another 50 MW of solar energy to its portfolio. PNM also wants to boost output from its current wind and geothermal resources as part of a plan to comply with the state's renewable energy standards. The state Public Regulation Commission wrapped up hearings on the proposal this week.
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Industry News
Five years ago, a mere 0.34 GW of energy storage could be found globally. Fast forward and the market is expecting 6 GW to be installed in 2017 alone. Globally, analysts expect the energy storage market to grow 47 percent in 2017 over 2016 installations. Most of these deployments will be utility-scale projects, while other markets are also showing significant growth.
Puerto Rico could follow the lead of other hurricane-prone areas of the U.S. in rebuilding its power grid for resiliency. The power plants are concentrated in the south, near ports where the oil and diesel fuel they rely on is imported. High wires bring power across the island’s mountainous interior to population centers like San Juan and replacing those remote lines and poles could mean cutting new roads or even using helicopters.
2017 will be the first ever in which there are more grid-tied residential battery storage system deployments than new off-grid and grid-independent systems in the U.S. GTM estimates that in 2016, over 4,400 residential battery systems were deployed representing 127 MWh, 86 percent of which were off-grid or grid-independent backup devices.
Total residential solar capacity hit 8,570 megawatts in June, up 35 percent from one year earlier and roughly the equivalent of seven large nuclear power plants like the Wolf Creek nuclear power plant in Kansas. Installed residential solar capacity now is more than triple the level of 2014, EIA said.
