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In pursuit of a smart grid, many utilities have focused solely on deploying and integrating advanced metering infrastructure. Consumer outreach supporting the technology has been uneven at best.

In late 2011, utilities asked DEFG EcoAlign for research focused on smart grid communications. In response, the marketing agency has published Meta Analysis and Utility Case Studies on Smart Grid Communications, DETech Research Consortium .

The report presents a high level summary of detailed analysis of the issues. Researchers drew on case studies from five utilities and a survey of industry experts to establish a baseline of consumer knowledge and identify best practices.

You can download the report  free of charge; however, registration is required.

DEFG EcoAlign manages a research consortium of North American energy utilities that seek solutions for energy efficiency, demand response, distributed renewable energy generation initiatives, and optimal use of smart grid assets.

Clean Energy Ambassadors (CEA) Lunchtime Webinar Series continues with a FREE webinar, Best Practices in Energy Star Programs for Utilities, Tuesday, July 17, at 12 noon CDT.

Wondering what a successful energy efficiency program looks like? Hear from utilities that have gained mass participation in Energy Star programs, and discover proven strategies for getting customers to embrace energy efficiency.

CEA Webinars are held from 12-1 pm Central time (11 a.m.-12 p.m. MDT) on the third Tuesday of each month. Because the webinars are focused on the needs of consumer-owned utilities, the discussion can be specific, candid, and informal. If you have just learned about the webinar series, listen to the recording of the May webinar, How to Induce Energy Efficient Behavior Among Your Members/Customers .

Visit Clean Energy Ambassadors  to register for this free event and to see the full line-up of CEA services and events. If you have any questions, please contact Stevie Moe at 406-969-1040.

Utilities with residential customers who need help financing whole-house improvements or renewable energy systems should explore the PowerSaver Loan Program .  The Electric and Gas Industries Association  (EGIA) has teamed up with Sun West Mortgage Company to create this Federal Housing Administration-sponsored financing program. 

Qualified homeowners may borrow up to $25,000 for energy-efficient and renewable energy improvements to their primary residence.  The allowable improvements include installing insulation, duct sealing, replacing doors and windows, central heating and cooling systems, water heaters, solar panels, energy-efficient roofing and ground-source heat pumps. Coupled with competitive interest rates, PowerSaver offers finance terms of up to 15 years for qualified energy-efficiency home improvements and up to 20 years for renewable energy improvements.  

These competitive interest rate loans are offered through pre-screened EGIA GEOSmart authorized contractors to eligible homeowners at no cost to the contractors. Learn about the requirements  for becoming a PowerSaver contractor.  

Sun West is now accepting applications  for California homes, and is expanding PowerSaver to Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah on July 1 as part of its nationwide rollout concluding over the next few months.

Western is taking a leadership role in transitioning to a more resilient and flexible electric grid and to achieving much greater coordination among system operators. If we can take greater advantage of clean energy resources, while at the same time reducing costs to customers, we can bring the benefits of increased connectivity and enhanced reliability to more Americans. You can learn more about in Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu’s May 30, 2012 blog post.

We need your input

Your leadership and participation will help guide this effort to transform our transmission grid into a 21st century system, stimulate job creation, take greater advantage of new technologies and existing resources, reduce price and supply risk and advance our international competitiveness. We look forward to working closely with you throughout the process.

Please register for one of our events. Registration will end two weeks before each event:

July 17—Rapid City, S.D.
July 18—Billings, Mont. (listening session only)
July 24—Phoenix, Ariz.
July 26—Sacramento/Folsom, Calif. (held in Rancho Cordova)
July 31—Loveland, Colo.
Aug. 2—Sioux Falls, S.D.

If you can’t attend a meeting, you can still comment via email. Please provide your name and identify your organizational affiliation in your submission. Your comments will be most useful to the team if submitted by Aug. 3; however, we will accept comments until Aug. 17. The team will review all comments submitted, but you should not expect a response to your comments.

Electric utility groups are applauding the Energy Department’s (DOE) decision to reconsider a rule it issued last year that would limit the size of residential water heaters manufactured after April 2015.

In April 2010, the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency issued a final rule on energy conservation standards for residential water heaters. Electric utility groups feared the rule would interfere with demand-response programs in which consumers allow their utilities to control their water heater’s cycling based on grid conditions.

On June 6, DOE issued a request for information seeking comments on how the rule would affect utility programs that use high-storage-volume (above 55 gallons) electric storage water heaters to reduce peak electricity demand.

The American Public Power Association (APPA) , National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) , PJM Interconnection  and the Steffes Corp.  issued a statement June 12 applauding the DOE’s move to request more information on this issue.

“APPA is pleased that the Department of Energy has taken this important first step toward relieving the 2010 constraints imposed on electric water heaters in utility demand-response programs,” said President and CEO Mark Crisson. “Large-volume electric water heaters provide an environmentally friendly and cost effective means for utilities to improve overall system efficiency.”

NRECA CEO Glenn English concurred, noting that electric co-ops have relied on the energy storage capacity of residential water heaters to help manage demand on their distribution systems.

DOE will accept comments through July 13. Information on submitting comments can be found in the RFI. APPA encourages its members that have water heater programs to submit information. Read more.

Public bodies, nonprofit corporations, institutions of higher education, rural cooperatives and Native American tribes may apply for grants through the Rural Business Opportunity Grant (RBOG) Program to support projects to improve economic conditions in rural areas.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) created the highly competitive RBOG program to stimulate sustainable economic development in rural communities with exceptional needs. It is estimated that the available funding will accommodate around 24 grant requests nationwide.

Applications for the grants must be received by Aug. 6, 2012 at the USDA Rural Development State Office in order to be considered for funding. Read more. Source: DOE Tribal Energy Program via Green Power and Market Research News, 6/14/12

Learn how utilities across the country are integrating solar power with a free webinar, SEPA Top 10 Utility Solar Rankings Report: Solar Power Fastest Growing Utility Generation Source in 2011, Thursday, June 21, 12 noon, MDT.  

This webinar will focus on the Solar Electric Power Association’s key findings, including:

• Utilities are adapting to solar as their fastest growing electricity source.
• For the fourth straight year, utilities integrated a record amount of new solar power, despite the recession.
• Utility-driven solar procurement is vital to rapid solar market expansion.

In 2011, utilities interconnected over 62,500 PV systems.  This annual volume of smaller, distributed solar interconnections is unlike anything the utility industry has previously managed, and conservative forecasts indicate that this number will grow to more than 150,000 interconnections in 2015.

Utility executives and renewable program staff, strategic planners, project developers and solar industry stakeholders are invited to join speakers Mike Taylor, SEPA research director, and Becky Campbell, SEPA research manager, to examine how the solar market has changed and what the new trends are going to be.

Register now for this free event. Please contact Stephanie Szurek at 202-559-2023 with questions.

Survey Data Also Available

The Solar Electric Power Association   (SEPA) has just released its fifth annual the 2011 Utility Solar Rankings Report. Utility Solar Rankings analyzes the amount of new solar power interconnected by U.S. electric utilities in 2011, including annual and cumulative national Top 10 rankings and annual rankings by region and utility-type. The report also includes several additional Top 10 “breakout” ranking categories, including annual and cumulative largest solar projects, cumulative penetration rate (number of projects per 1,000 utility customers), and cumulative megawatts for investor-owned utility holding companies.

The findings come from more than 240 of the nation’s most solar-active power providers, and highlight such key market trends as:

• Utilities are adapting to solar as their fastest growing electricity source. In 2011, utilities interconnected over 62,500 PV systems, posing questions about how they will physically process this volume of interconnection requests, accommodate high-penetration growth on the distribution grid and resolve the economic implications of reduced electricity sales.

• For the fourth straight year, utilities integrated a record amount of new solar power, despite the recession. Residential homes accounted for more than 89 percent of the installations, while commercial rooftop installations accounted for more than 53 percent of the capacity. SEPA expects continued growth in 2012, driven by sustained price decreases and a build-out of large solar power plant contracts.

• Utility-driven solar procurement is vital to rapid solar market expansion, representing 39 percent of the new solar capacity in 2011, versus 9 percent in 2008.

For these utilities, solar power is part of their day-to-day operations and they are already adapting to this rapid growth and the operational and regulatory changes that come with it. In the process, the path that other utilities will soon follow is being laid.

You can Download the report free of charge today.

SEPA is also making the report’s survey data (pdf) on solar installations available for purchase. The dataset includes the responses from the 200-plus utilities covered in the report, including all tables and figures from the full report, unpublished summary statistics and data by utility including solar capacity in megawatts and number of solar installations.

Note: This story originally appeared in the Energy Services Bulletin for June 2012.

Winning the America’s Home Energy Education Challenge was a big victory for the students of Carter County, Mont., and Western is proud to have played a small role in the team’s success through our customer Southeast Electric Cooperative.

Southeast Electric Member Services Rep. Marlene Waterland shows students from Hawks Home School the different types of light bulbs on the lighting display, borrowed from Western’s Equipment Loan Program. (Photo by Southeast Electric Cooperative)

Teaching energy awareness

The team of five schools split a prize of $15,000 for tracking and reducing home energy use over three months. The Department of Energy created the national school competition to educate students and their families about the opportunities to save money by saving energy. Teams of third through eighth grade students worked with their science teachers and local utility companies to develop energy savings plans that reduce the amount of energy used to power their homes.

Marlene Waterland of Southeast Electric coordinated the program for Alzada Elementary School, Carter County High School, Ekalaka Elementary School, Hammond School and Hawks Home School. Using a lighting efficiency display and infrared cameras from Western’s Equipment Loan Program, the member services representative introduced students to different ways of thinking about energy waste and efficiency. “The displays are excellent teaching tools that we couldn’t afford otherwise,” Waterland said.

“It was great to be able to help Southeast Electric Cooperative and Marlene inspire these kids to apply their math and science skills to a real-life problem—how to save money by using energy efficiently at home,” said Equipment Loan Manager Gary Hoffmann.

Showing and telling

One of Western’s most popular educational tools, the lighting display shows how new technology can save energy using equipment everyone has in their homes—light bulbs.  The new lighting display incorporates lamps that may still be unfamiliar to consumers. “A lot of our customers are still trying to adjust to compact fluorescent lights (CFLs),” Waterland admitted. “It helps for them to see the different Kelvin ratings, and learn that they can buy brighter lights.”

The long-lasting cold cathode bulb, which is designed to be used outdoors in cold temperatures, also peaked student interest. “They could see how it could be useful for saving energy specifically in Montana,” said Waterland.

Southeast Electric Cooperative frequently borrows Western’s IR cameras to perform free home energy audits for its customers. Using the tool to teach 7^th and 8^th graders about energy losses gave Waterland the chance to do a “commercial” for Southeast’s free home energy audit program. She also took the camera to another school in the utility’s territory that wasn’t participating in the Challenge. “I try to schedule as many appointments and events as possible when I have Western equipment checked out,” she explained.

She walked the students of the small country school through a preliminary energy audit, showing them how the camera worked and what to look for. During the audit, the students discovered that a furnace filter had not been properly installed, so they were able to correct a problem.

All talents welcomed

The students of Carter County School District turned out to be quick—and creative—studies. They talked to their family members about energy- and money-saving steps they could take, including turning off the lights when leaving the room and running the laundry machine with cooler water and full loads. In an agricultural community, using timers for engine block heaters for tractors turned out to be a big saver.

It wasn’t only what the students did, but how they did it that earned them the award. Some students went right for the dollars and cents, Waterland recalled. “Southeast publishes fact sheets that give the monthly costs for running appliances, and they put those to good use,” she said. “You could see how the project pushed them to apply their math skills.”

Others applied their imagination to energy planning, with one sixth grade class writing fiction stories about saving energy. The national competition included a poster contest that gave artistically inclined students a way to encourage their families and communities to improve the energy efficiency of their homes. Southeast awarded its own prize of $50 for the best local poster.

Local buy-in

To sharpen the local competition, Southeast also offered a $100 prize to the family that saved the most energy during the competition. “Of the 49 students participating, 20 families reduced their energy use, and the winner saved 41 percent,” Waterland said. “The family told us that their daughter ran around the house every night unplugging everything.”

Winning America’s Home Energy Education Challenge required focus, teamwork and long hours—and not just from the students. “It was demanding competition and the teachers were really good at keeping everyone on task,” said Waterland.

Waterland considers the 177 hours she spent coordinating the schools’ participation a worthwhile investment. “Southeast is a relatively small utility—only 900 customers and 2,000 meters—and we all support the community,” she explained. “Winning this competition is a source of pride for everyone.”

But the prize is more than just hometown pride, or even $15,000. It’s seeing students get excited about using math and science, and discovering creative ways to apply new skills. It’s teaching young people and their families to treat energy as the valuable resource to be used thoughtfully. And it’s preparing tomorrow’s consumers to work as partners with their utilities. “A student called me recently to find out whether it costs more to run a computer or a toaster, so they are still exploring how to save energy,” Waterland said. “There will be another competition, and these kids will be ready for it.”

Western customers can borrow educational displays—or other tools—from our Equipment Loan Program free of charge. You pay only for return shipping. Reserve your equipment online, or call Gary Hoffmann at 720-962-7420.