September 8
Uplight Demand Response Program Reaches 100,000 Participants
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
PG&E and Uplight this week announced that PG&E’s SmartAC™ Smart Thermostat program, implemented by Uplight, has surpassed 100,000 enrollments. This major milestone makes the program among the largest residential customer demand response programs in the country. As California confronts climate change impacts including extreme heat events, demand response programs have become a critical and necessary tool for utilities to manage the grid.
When President Biden announced that the United States would be rejoining the Paris Agreement in April 2021, he set a target to reduce economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions by 50-52 percent from 2005 levels by the year 2030. This major announcement at the federal level added to the momentum that had been building for years through state and utility renewable energy goals.
Arizona public power utility Salt River Project and CMBlu Energy on August 31 announced a pilot project to deploy long-duration energy storage in the Phoenix area. The 5-MW, 10-hour-duration project, named Desert Blume, will use CMBlu’s unique non-lithium technology, and the firm will build, own and operate the batteries on behalf of SRP at their Copper Crossing Energy and Research Center in Florence, Arizona.
According to the Illinois-based ComEd, since 2008, customers have saved more than $8 billion on their bills as a result of the ComEd Energy Efficiency Program, saved around 76 million MW hours of electricity and reduced carbon emissions by nearly 65 billion pounds. For reference, the last is about the same as removing more than 6.3 million cars off the road for a year.
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Industry News
Renewable energy already beats fossil fuels on cost globally – and according to analysts, the gap is only going to grow. By 2030, technology improvements could slash today’s prices by a quarter for wind and by half for solar, according to the authors of a recent report from clean energy think tank RMI.
EVs could drive a 38-percent rise in U.S. electricity consumption by 2050, according to National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates. The demand will provide utilities with new revenues, but it will also require distribution system upgrades and load management strategies to ensure charging vehicles help maintain grid reliability rather than overload local electricity systems, experts say.
Amid widespread disruption affecting all aspects of the utility marketplace – from rising system costs to environmental and energy efficiency goals to referendums on natural gas – the nation’s electric and gas utilities are quickly recognizing that branding is a critical component of successful customer-facing strategies.
The U.S. solar industry expects to add a record 32 GW of new capacity in 2023, a 52-percent increase from 2022, according to the U.S. Solar Market Insight Q3 2023 report released this week by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie. The solar market has been hampered in recent years by supply chain challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and exacerbated by restrictive trade policy.
