September 3
Georgia Power Works to Build EV Infrastructure in Georgia
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
Georgia Power has taken a number of steps to build out the state’s EV infrastructure and support the growing number of EVs in the state of Georgia, currently home to 30,000 EVs and 930 public charging stations. “At Georgia Power, we know that the ‘future is electric’ in our state and that future is now. We are committed to working with state officials to support the growth of the local EV industry for consumers and manufacturers alike,” Nicole Faulk, SVP of Customer Strategy & Solutions at Georgia Power, said.
Austin Energy is keeping electric vehicle drivers energized with the deployment of seven new fast chargers at 811 Electric Drive, bringing the total number at this location to eight. With this addition, Austin Energy now operates 29 fast charging stations around Austin – all of which are powered by 100-percent clean Texas energy through Austin Energy’s GreenChoice program.
With a new tool developed by Evolved Energy Research, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) demonstrated this week a series of low-cost actions and cuts the power and transportation sectors could undertake to get the U.S. halfway to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. “The electricity and transportation sectors are the lowest hanging fruit for climate progress, offering the biggest and cheapest opportunities to cut carbon pollution right now,” said Morgan Rote, Senior Manager for U.S. Climate at EDF.
Electric panels in up to 48 million U.S. single-family homes will need to be upgraded to fully transition away from fossil fuels and use electricity for space and water heating, cooking, vehicle charging and other applications, according to new research from residential electricity research group Pecan Street. With an average cost of $2,000 for an upgraded panel, that represents a nearly “$100 billion impediment to residential electrification,” the group said.
Get Your Weekly Edition
Industry News
Entergy Texas wrapped up a years-long project last week in its state’s southeast region, with the announcement that it had concluded deploying advanced meters to homes and businesses. The upgraded devices offer quicker, more accurate outage detection and energy management, thanks to their connection to a series of online tools. Thanks to this, customers can access their accounts and see how much electricity they have used each day, in as close to real time as possible: 15-minute increments for residential customers.
The Public Utility Commission of Texas has until November 15 to decide on Tesla's application to sell electricity in the state’s deregulated market. Tesla's application, originally filed on August 17, seeks to make subsidiary Tesla Energy Ventures a retail electric provider (REP) that could purchase electricity on the wholesale market and sell it to retail consumers. The company has also filed applications to build utility-scale Megapack battery storage facilities in Houston and near its new Gigafactory in Austin.
Organizers at the Community Climate Collaborative (C3) know handwringing won’t change the fact that residential buildings are the number one emitters of heat-trapping gases in Charlottesville. How, C3 advocates pondered, could they possibly shrink that footprint? For starters, by linking with a like-minded local nonprofit that didn’t mind getting its hands dirty with a small-scale, fuel-switching experiment.
With the launch of the online Charge Up Hawaii tool, Hawaiian Electric hopes to gain insight to customers’ desires for EV charging stations to better suit their upcoming mobility needs. The tool is a story map platform that uses a mix of surveys and an interactive map for pinning suggestions as a means of picking customers’ brains about where they would like to see future EV charging stations deployed.
