Advanced Energy Perspectives

Given the market surge of air and ground source heat pumps, Michiganders have more options than ever to efficiently and affordably heat and cool their homes with electricity. Especially when paired with additional energy efficiency measures, load management, dynamic rates, and distributed energy resources (DERs), the savings can be significant. But until customers upgrade their appliances and ditch the fossil fuels, many remain at risk. In Michigan, gas utilities are rapidly spending on capital-intense pipeline replacement and modernization projects, leading to higher and higher delivery costs for their customers.

In recent years, Massachusetts has outlined – and consistently reinforced – one of the clearest and most unambiguous visions for the future of clean buildings and clean heat: electrification. This includes the Department of Public Utilities’ (DPU’s) landmark order establishing regulatory principles and framework to wind down investments in the Commonwealth’s natural gas pipeline distribution system.  

United's latest report with Demand Side Analytics identifies ways in which the Commonwealth could support electrification without abandoning its energy conservation and long-term system cost containment imperatives. What we discovered: A time-of-use (TOU) electric rate, paired with enhanced energy efficiency efforts, can significantly reduce residential energy bills for electrified homes while mitigating rate increases for all homes.

Today, Maryland legislators had a critical opportunity to address the state’s affordability crisis head-on. The House Economic Matters Committee discussed the Affordable Grid Act (HB 1225/SB 908), and Advanced Energy United’s Katie Mettle testified as an industry expert to explain how the bill works and highlight why it's a common-sense, proactive solution to rising energy costs and the state’s evolving energy needs.

Over the course of 2024, Advanced Energy United has been tracking and often engaging on, clean building policy developments across the country. As market and technology trends evolve at breakneck pace, it’s up to states to either harness the momentum to deliver for consumers, or to let outdated policies stymie economic growth and spiral energy costs out of control.

In this blog, we’ve rounded up several emerging trends related to building electrification worth watching in legislatures, at Public Utility Commissions, and among executive offices as they confront these issues in real time.

For the past 20 years, states across the country have been working to re-orient our electric utilities around 21st-century goals, including greenhouse gas reductions, distributed resource integration, peak load management, resilience from emerging weather threats, energy burden alleviation, and more. These efforts have led to a plethora of new policies, programs, and processes that span from demand response and time varying rates to non-wires alternatives, performance incentive mechanisms to distribution system planning and hosting capacity analysis. Many of these reforms seek to mitigate the inherent bias in the electric utility world towards capital expenditures and large utility-owned resources, to varying degrees of success.