Why should you incorporate equity into your TE plan?

Transportation is electrifying across the US and Canada, and early transportation electrification (TE) efforts focused on offering incentives to get more people driving EVs. These incentives often benefited only upper-income customers.

Happy CX Day! To celebrate, we’re honoring this year’s winners of the E Source Achievements in Customer and Employee Experience. Each year we celebrate the great work utilities are doing to create excellent experiences for their customers and provide a supportive and engaging workplace for their employees. Without further ado, here are this year’s finalists!

Happy (belated) #EEDay2022! Energy Efficiency Day is a collaborative effort supported by energy efficiency advocacy groups around the US, including ACEEE, the Alliance to Save Energy, and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Equity stakeholder groups are a perfect opportunity for utilities to bridge the trust gap with communities of color. Evolving the relationship begins with acknowledging and addressing historical inequities.

To partner differently, utilities must benchmark and build intercultural competency. And they must reframe how they solve for equity to properly engage and equip stakeholders to equitably build the community.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 includes significant funding for renewable energy. The IRA makes loans and tax credits available for things like clean-energy projects and transmission infrastructure. Utilities have an opportunity to use these incentives to add renewable energy to their generation mix. But how do utility customers feel about renewable energy? Let’s find out!

Water pipes fracture and leak as they degrade over time. And utilities lose water supply and potential revenue through leaking infrastructure.

A new report by the National Wildlife Federation and Texas Living Waters Project, Hidden Reservoirs: Addressing Water Loss in Texas (PDF), estimates that Texas utilities lose 572,000 acre-feet of water per year, or 51 gallons per day, through leakage.

As utilities begin reexamining benefit-cost analysis (BCA) processes in relation to electrification and distributed energy resources (DERs), there’s an opportunity to pair well-designed BCAs with other analyses that better assess equity efforts.

According to the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) Vision Statement for Equity in the Power Grid:

Low- and moderate-income (LMI) customers have their own unique challenges that make a homogenous approach to serving them pointless. Historically, utilities lumped LMI customers in with the rest, casting a wide net and hoping the right message or program would stick over time. But that didn’t work then, and it won’t work now. To best serve LMI customers, we need to understand them at a granular level and remember that they’re humans.

Our tech roundup webinars keep you up to date on the latest developments in energy efficiency, load management, and decarbonization technologies. We discuss the technologies and trends our researchers have been following over the past six months that offer great potential for your pilots and programs. We recently discussed 10 exciting technologies and concepts as part of our Fall 2022 tech roundup. Here are three of our favorites from the list.