Governor Andrew Cuomo announced new energy efficiency standards for New York on Friday, calling for investor-owned utilities to achieve annual efficiency savings equal to 3 percent of sales by 2025.
The new target would accelerate energy efficiency by more than 40 percent over current forecasts and reduce energy consumption by 185 trillion Btu. The state also committed $36.5 million to train more than 19,500 New Yorkers for clean energy jobs.
“Energy efficiency is the most cost-effective way for New Yorkers to lower utility bills, curb harmful emissions and battle climate change,” said Governor Cuomo, in a statement.
The energy efficiency plan should help the state achieve nearly one-third of its climate goal to reduce emissions by 40 percent by 2030.
New York’s Public Service Commission also approved a series of measures last week as part of the state’s Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) initiative. Now in its fourth year, REV is a sweeping overhaul of utility and energy regulations meant to enable more distributed energy on the grid.
One of the changes will allow distributed energy storage projects of up to 5 megawatts to connect to the grid, which the commission says will expand the integration of larger energy storage technologies.
“New York is sending strong signals to the storage industry to come to invest in New York, and those signals are coming in [the form of many] different changes, and this is one of them,” said Anne Reynolds, executive director of the Alliance for Clean Energy New York.
Regulators also improved upon the application and contract process for Standardized Interconnection Requirements, which should help developers connect distributed generation projects to the distribution system more efficiently.
Recent Comments