The New York State Department of Public Service announced the first seven Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) demonstration projects.
While the traditional utility business model is based on spending electric consumer dollars and earning a regulated rate of return, these projects include private investment from third-party partners and are intended to demonstrate how new revenue streams can be created from the market, rather than from the traditional rate base.
The projects include:
Retroficiency and Con Edison – Building Efficiency Marketplace: Retroficiency and Con Edison will build a clean energy project origination, bidding, and technical support platform for small commercial customers. The platform will analyze customer data to identify opportunities for high potential projects and enable customers to put projects out to bid.
Simple Energy and Orange and Rockland – Customer Engagement and Marketplace Platform: Simple Energy and Orange and Rockland will provide an online engagement platform that leverages customer data and analytics to help customers find energy products and services that meet their needs.
Smarter Grid Solutions and Iberdrola – Flexible Interconnect Solution: Smarter Grid Solutions, which has its US headquarters in New York City, and Iberdrola will offer a new, less costly, and faster way for customers and third parties to connect large distributed generation projects to the grid. The partners will provide an “infrastructure as a service,” managing the resource on an ongoing basis to avoid the need for new hard infrastructure.
SunPower, Sunverge, and Con Edison – Clean Virtual Power Plant: SunPower, SunVerge and Con Edison will offer residential customers a resiliency service, bundling solar with energy storage. The project will test customer demand for this premium service that can keep the lights on during an outage, and will aggregate and manage the projects in a “virtual power plant” that can provide grid services during blue sky days. A future phase of this project may also test time of use pricing.
Central Hudson – Central-E: Central Hudson and a partner to be chosen will build an online portal for energy products and services. It will provide customers with personalized information and recommendations and offer an enhanced data analytics package for customers who want greater insight into their energy use.
Iberdrola – Community Energy Coordination: Iberdrola and a partner to be chosen will offer a new service for communities. By aggregating local demand for clean energy technologies, targeting outreach to areas where clean energy solutions can provide the greatest system benefits, and orchestrating a bulk purchase from third party providers on behalf of customers, this service will lower costs and facilitate community action. A next phase of this project could expand the offering to include financing services that further reduce costs and barriers for communities.
National Grid – Neighborhood Solar: National Grid will help low-to moderate-income customers access clean energy while reducing arrears through a neighborhood solar project in an economically distressed area. In addition to using reduced uncollectible debts to help recoup the initial cost of the project, it will test how solar can be paired with communications technologies to deliver benefits to the overall electricity system.
