A group of New England utilities plans to seek federal funding for a regional energy data platform that will make it easier for consumers and contractors to estimate potential savings from efficiency improvements and new electrical technologies. ing.
Clean energy advocates believe this type of service is key to supporting the rollout of the Inflation Control Act's rebates and, more broadly, controlling the cost and demand for a low-carbon power grid.
Energy providers Unitil, Eversource and Liberty Utilities have joined several of their subsidiaries to propose new data platforms to the U.S. Department of Energy's Grid Resilience Innovation Partnership (GRIP) grant program created by the bipartisan Infrastructure Act. and collaborates with state organizations and government agencies.
Their $29 million data hub initiative builds on a similar state-level platform that has been in the works in New Hampshire since 2019, with half of the funding requested from the Department of Energy. Supporters say federal funding is also needed to encourage the state's regulators. To give final approval to the project.
The regional data hub, which will open over the next four years, will provide millions of gas and electric customers and third-party service providers in New Hampshire, Connecticut, Maine and Massachusetts with “very granular usage information,” Unitil said. The plan is to provide standardized access to “.
“As this data becomes more easily available, customers will be able to better understand their energy consumption and help decide on energy-saving measures to take in their homes and workplaces,” Unitil said. he said in a statement. “For example, this information may be used to obtain price quotes from rooftop solar providers, obtain price quotes from competing suppliers, or help storage providers properly size behind-the-meter batteries. It may be used to make decisions.”
“Incredibly stupid manual process”
Advocates say Texas and New York, states with integrated power grids, currently have multiple utility data platforms, but customer data access remains inconsistent in New England and many other places. It is said that there is no.
In a concept paper on the data hub proposal submitted to the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission earlier this year, Northeast utilities said the cost of efficiency projects and clean energy upgrades, known as distributed energy resources (DERs), It said it could be caused by a “peculiar process.” ” and “custom-built electronic interfaces” required to handle each customer’s data.
“Currently, DER providers pay as much as $300,000 a year for screen-scraping programs to extract customer electricity data from bill PDFs, while others We are installing a monitoring package with functionally redundant solar power and energy storage applications, driving costs upwards of $15,000 per installation,” the proposal states.
For example, to estimate cost savings in a rooftop solar quote, a homeowner may need to provide a prospective installer with a year's worth of paper or electronic invoices that can be manually aggregated and analyzed. However, it's an “incredibly stupid manual process,” says Sam Evans. – Brown, executive director of Clean Energy New Hampshire, a nonprofit that is participating in the regional data hub proposal.
“And that's just at the single-family homeowner level. Think of a multifamily project where you have 40, 50, 100 units, each with their own electric bill,” he said. “It's an absolute nightmare.”
Automated systems can access customer data on demand in a standardized format and deliver expected project savings at the push of a button, he said. Contractors he spoke to called this approach “transformative in the way they interact with customers.”
In a statement, Eversource spokeswoman Sara Paduano said the data hub will support energy dashboards specifically for the environmental justice sector, with the goal of “reducing the energy burden on historically disadvantaged communities.” He said this could help visualize progress towards climate goals.
“By breaking down the walls of data that has traditionally been stored and owned by utility companies, Unitil removes major barriers for a wide range of stakeholders, enabling them to use their data in meaningful ways to support an equitable clean energy transition. We believe we can move forward,” Util's statement said.
Data for a more responsive grid
Michael Murray, president of the Mission Data Coalition, another nonprofit group working on the hub project, said estimated savings from individual energy projects are not just nice to have, they're often necessary. Certain Inflation Control Act rebates are only available to projects that can demonstrate energy savings of at least 20%.
“This bill was really intended to be the first kind of convergence of efficiency projects into smart grid assets,” Murray said. “It's no longer just 'efficiency is in itself and we're only interested in annual energy savings.' The question is how can it become interactive and create things like 'virtual power plants'?” Is it part of the concept? ”
Better data on individual projects allows customers to access savings from new rate designs that reduce usage during peak demand periods, increasing resiliency in grids powered by more variable renewable energy and potentially reduce costs, the proposal says.
“Energy data will increasingly become the currency of the modern power grid,” Evans-Brown said. “It's very difficult to manage peaks if you don't know where they're coming from and what's driving them down to the consumer level.”
Murray said that without standardized and streamlined access to energy data, contractors looking to take advantage of IRA rebates in states that have chosen to offer them would have to repeat thousands of separate manual processes. He said they would be faced with a costly and time-consuming burden.
“[IRAs]are going to impact millions of American households. Each of these is multiple data requests and processing. So we need to find a way to do it efficiently,” he said. I did. Otherwise, “all of our federal money will be spent on mindless overhead costs instead of actually providing value to people.”
Not all New England states and utilities are participating in the grant proposal. Avangrid, a Connecticut-based company with subsidiaries including Central Maine Power and CMP, is one of the companies that declined to participate.
CMP received a $30 million GRIP grant in the program's first round last year for technologies that reduce the frequency and impact of power outages, and will seek additional GRIP grants of its own this year.
“Our decision in the second round was to focus on reliability and capacity improvement projects in Maine, particularly those that impact disadvantaged communities,” spokesperson John Breed said in a statement. mentioned in. “We are aware of the concept of a regional joint venture energy data hub and will monitor the performance of the program if funding is received.”
Murray's long-term goal is a data platform that covers the entire territory of ISO-New England, the regional grid manager for six states. He said if the project goes ahead, utilities and their customers who don't participate risk being left in silos and outdated systems.
“The entire industry is moving toward automated systems, and New Hampshire is building it,” he said. “That’s where we ultimately have to get to.”
This article first appeared on Energy News Network and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.