Electricity
Bringing Energy Efficiency into the 21st Century
In April 2016, RMI hosted its third annual eLab Accelerator. Described as a boot camp for electricity innovation, the four-day intensive work session brought together 13 teams from across North America—from North Carolina to Ottawa and California to New York—to work on new business models, energy innovation districts, and innovative…
Your Home or Business Can Cut Power Plant Emissions
Customer demand for energy services is evolving quickly. Both residential and institutional customers increasingly demand products and services that are both “green” (i.e., environmentally friendly) and “smart” (i.e., Internet-connected, communicating, and automated). Innovative companies are busy developing new products and services to chase this demand as fast as they can.
Report Release: The Status and Promise of Advanced M&V
The innovative Nest thermostat helped to mainstream the concept of a smarter home. Now, high-resolution smart meters, numerous communicating smart thermostats, nonintrusive load monitoring, and new cloud-based software are transforming the concept of smarter buildings more broadly. You may not have heard of all of these devices, but your local…
Why We Still Need To Discuss Grid Defection
The rapidly declining costs of distributed energy resources (DERs), including rooftop solar photovoltaics (PV) and behind-the-meter batteries, have introduced new dynamics into a traditionally slow-moving electricity industry. This paradigm shift has ushered us into a new era where previous assumptions about how, where, and at what scale electricity is best…
Solar Embrace
More than a year ago, Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) announced its Shine Program would focus on community-scale solar. We claimed that community-scale solar could be procured at costs close to utility-scale solar, unlocking a 5–30 GW market by 2020. However, we could not have predicted the success of our initial…