December 16
Oncor and Toyota to Research Vehicle-to-Grid
Top consumer smart energy news hand-selected and brought to you by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative.
Member News
Toyota Motor North America and Oncor Electric Delivery have agreed to collaborate on a pilot project around vehicle-to-grid (V2G), a technology that allows vehicles to flow energy from their battery back onto the electric grid. The effort will be led by Toyota’s Electric Vehicle Charging Solutions team, marking an important first collaboration with a public utility for Toyota in the U.S. around battery EVs.
Direct current fast chargers (DCFC) can charge most EVs up to 80 percent in under an hour, but they have significant draw on the grid when doing so. Potomac Edison, a FirstEnergy subsidiary, is testing the use of a 500-kW/1-MWh battery installed alongside two DCFC and one charging station at the Myersville Park and Ride near the Interstate 70 and Route 17 interchange to reduce that demand.
Forty electricity providers, including many cooperatives, are implementing CLEAResult’s Rooftop Solar Assessment tool to make the decision-making process of purchasing home solar easier and more customized for their customers. The online assessment is the latest energy education innovation from EV resource leader ChooseEV, which CLEAResult acquired in May to expand the company’s growing energy transition practice within the CLEAResult ATLAS™ platform.
Using Itron’s smart streetlights, Baltimore Gas & Electric announced that it intends to deploy and manage 260,000 new lights across its Maryland service territory to reduce energy consumption, increase response to power supply failures and control lighting levels automatically. BGE utilizes an existing Itron multi-purpose Industrial Internet of Things Network for smart technology and intends to add new streetlights to it.
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Industry News
Last month, Lyft announced it was joining a coalition of companies looking to help users of their platforms aggressively decarbonize, building on a 2020 commitment to reach 100 percent EVs by the end of 2030. This week, the ride-hailing company unveiled the tangible steps it’s taking to make good on that promise. It rolled out several sizable financial incentives to help its drivers switch to EVs.
Trade barriers and ongoing supply chain constraints led to a decrease in new solar capacity in the third quarter compared to the same period a year ago. Specifically, the U.S. Solar Market Insight Q4 2022 said the United States added 4.6 GW of new solar capacity in Q3 2022, down 17 percent year over year. These same issues are expected to cause a 23-percent decline in solar installations this year compared to 2021.
Several promising trends for utilities will likely continue next year, but they may be blunted by challenges such as rising retail electricity prices, according to a report released last week by Deloitte, a consulting firm. “Supply chain snags, rising costs and extreme weather are likely to continue plaguing the power sector,” Deloitte said in the report.
Overall residential electric utility satisfaction drops as more customers are experiencing higher monthly bills and feeling worse off financially, according to J.D. Power’s 2022 Electric Utility Residential Customer Satisfaction Study, released earlier this week. Specifically, overall satisfaction is 731 (on a 1,000-point scale), a decrease from 748 in 2021.
