Advanced Energy Perspectives

How quickly and efficiently New Jersey can transition to a 100% clean energy future depends in no small part on how the state’s utilities implement energy efficiency and demand management guidance recently issued by New Jersey’s Board of Public Utilities (BPU). At the end of July, the BPU voted 4-0 to approve an Order that largely implements Staff’s Straw Proposals on the 2nd Triennium of Energy Efficiency and Peak Demand Reduction Programs (Triennium 2), an every-three-year regulatory proceeding that defines the scope of utility demand side management programs. Triennium 2 has the potential to foster economic development in New Jersey, increase grid reliability and flexibility, and lower utility bills for residents by leveraging advanced energy technologies and services. However, the promise of these programs is in the hands of the state’s utilities. The NJ BPU designed Triennium 2 in a way that provides utilities with significant leeway to determine how aggressively and ambitiously to implement these programs. To maximize the guidance in this Order, utilities should make significant investments in the three areas covered by Triennium 2: electricity reduction measures, building decarbonization programs, and peak load demand-response initiatives. 

In our previous post, Charging toward the EV transition. Part 1. we covered the first three trends in EV legislation—looking back at 2022.

Since the start of this year’s legislative sessions, Advanced Energy Economy has been tracking energy legislation across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Congress through its online PowerSuite platform. PowerSuite provides policy tracking by policy professionals. In the process, we have identified several trends in how states are contemplating the future of their energy, transportation, and building sectors. The bills described in this post, which range from simply introduced to fully signed into law, by no means represent every bill in the country filed this year, but are rather indicative of the attention being devoted to each topic by lawmakers. What follows represents the top 10 state energy legislative issues of 2022.

All eyes were focused on energy negotiations in Washington for the better part of 2021, but with less fanfare, advanced energy companies powered a record-breaking year for investment in the energy transition. BloombergNEF and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy’s 10^th annual Sustainable Energy in America 2022 Factbook released last week quantifies the industry’s progress with year-over-year data and insights on energy efficiency and renewables. The Factbook records new highs in the deployment of renewable power, battery storage, and electric transportation, despite lingering COVID setbacks and supply chain bottlenecks economy wide.

Like anyone in construction, renewable energy developers are all too familiar with process hurdles and delays. But patience wears thin. In the vast PJM Interconnection region stretching from DC to Illinois, a huge pool of solar, wind, and battery storage projects are stuck in the grid operator’s Interconnection queue, often waiting years for technical and cost studies and final approvals needed to connect to the grid. This usually behind-the-scenes issue moved to center stage this month when PJM proposed a dramatic step: a two-year pause on formally accepting new interconnection applications so that the grid operator can focus on speeding up delayed projects and clearing some of the backlog. That pause will come with much needed improvements to PJM’s processes to speed up future interconnection requests. Those improvements won’t solve all the problems with PJM’s interconnection process, but they are a good start, and they can’t come soon enough.