Just in time for the holidays, the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) quietly gave the gift of more affordable electricity to millions of Pennsylvanians. PECO Energy Company, a leading Pennsylvania utility, had requested a significant distribution rate increase – meaning higher bills for its approximately 1.6 million electric customers. After months of discussion, last week… Keep reading →
East Coast utilities are making big grid investments to prep for a hot and stormy 2013. Fresh on the heels of Hurricane Sandy’s destruction last year, East Coast utilities are girding their grids for future storms, including a 2013 hurricane season that’s shaping up to be a tough one, according to the latest forecasts. That spending… Keep reading →
The Energy Efficient Buildings Hub, a public-private organization whose largest funder is the U.S. Department of Energy, is leading an ambitious charge to reduce energy consumption in Philadelphia’s commercial buildings. The hope is the model can be replicated in other cities across the US.
Because of the Hub’s efforts to “start moving the needle” on discussion of energy retrofits, the City of Philadelphia is likely to have a successful response to its new law requiring energy disclosure for large buildings, predicted Marla Thalheimer, Director of Sustainability at Liberty Property Trust, a commercial real estate firm and Hub partner. Keep reading →
We’ll let you be the judge of which is which in today’s good, bad and ugly smart meter round up, which will fill you in on everything from the latest opt outs, roll outs and left outs – to sabotage and another conspiracy theory.
ROLL OUTS Keep reading →
For Taff Tschamler, the deregulation of US retail electricity markets is a huge business opportunity rivaling the surge in competition that followed the breakup of AT&T in 1982.
Shifting the power-supply business away from utilities and toward an influx of new providers like North American Power, where Tschamler is a senior vice president, creates new revenue for those companies and cuts electric bills for consumers. Keep reading →
Pennsylvania is getting help in its campaign to persuade more retail electric customers to switch away from their local utilities to lower-cost suppliers.
AlphaBuyer, a Paoli, PA-based startup, is bundling customers and negotiating deals with power distributors that result in cost savings to households and new clients for suppliers who probably wouldn’t have got the additional business through their own marketing efforts. Keep reading →
Utilities battled to restore power to millions of customers in the US northeast early Sunday after high winds and flooding from Hurricane Irene caused widespread outages.
By about 9 a.m. Sunday, four utilities covering parts of Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Washington DC reported 1.48 million customers were without power after the storm toppled trees, knocking out local power lines. Keep reading →
Electric utilities and nuclear power plants in the mid-Atlantic area braced for widespread power outages from Hurricane Irene which some warned could cause more power disruption than any previous storm.
“This could be the worst storm we have ever seen,” said Karen Muldoon Geus, a spokeswoman for PECO, which supplies power to 1.6 million residential and commercial power customers in five counties in and around Philadelphia where the storm is expected to hit late Saturday and into Sunday. Keep reading →
