February 23
Itron and Schneider Electric Collaborate for Grid Edge Integrations
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Itron and Schneider Electric are collaborating to integrate their intelligent grid and distributed energy resource (DER) management solutions to “digitalize” the demand and supply of electricity. The two companies say they are working on dozens of integrated use cases across asset management, grid planning and operations, and DER management, and will work with utilities to integrate their solutions.
Salt River Project continues to experience significant load growth on its Arizona system and on Monday announced plans for a new all-source request for proposals for up to 1,200 MW of peak generating capacity and up to 2,500 MW of carbon-free capacity. SRP serves the Phoenix metropolitan area, which is one of the fastest growing in the nation.
AES Ohio is proposing to invest $682.7 million in its Smart Grid Phase 2 plan over the 10-year period starting July 2025. With the phase 2 plan, AES Ohio is proposing to continue the modernization of its grid, which has been underway in the first phase, with a focus on the ongoing rollout of smart technologies to improve system stability and performance and the backbone communication capabilities.
Virtual Peaker, a cloud-based SaaS company empowering modern utilities with the friendliest distributed energy platform on the planet, and ICF, a global consulting and technology services provider, collaborated with Central Hudson Gas & Electric to launch the EV ChargeSmart Program. EV ChargeSmart aims to achieve cost savings and grid resilience by encouraging participants to adjust their EV charging patterns voluntarily.
University of Delaware professor Willett Kempton is a pioneer of vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology. In fact, he and his team of EV researchers at the university have been turning electric vehicles into grid batteries since 2007, when they kicked off a first-of-a-kind experiment that’s since been replicated in V2G projects around the world.
Demand response programs that incentivize customers to reduce load or shift load usage to off-peak hours can help utilities balance the grid with fast-ramping flexibility and defer system investments. The catch is this: Utilities can’t implement demand response plans alone. Customers must participate, but will they? Utility professionals say customers will play their part, and there are proven ways to boost participation.
Environmental agencies in nine states will work together to reduce planet-warming carbon emissions by making electric heat pumps the norm for most new home HVAC equipment sales by 2040. The memorandum of understanding, spearheaded by the inter-agency nonprofit Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management, or NESCAUM, was signed by officials in California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon and Rhode Island.
Based on headlines alone, you might expect that the U.S. is cruising toward its clean electricity goals while sputtering toward its EV goals. But in a counterintuitive turn, a new report finds the opposite to be true. Electric vehicles are on track to meet the country’s goals of decarbonizing transportation — even if EV sales growth is slowing down after years of record-setting increases.