Atlantic City Electric Announces Major Actions to Combat Climate Change

Company launches comprehensive effort to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and drive resilience in support of New Jersey’s clean energy and climate goals

On Sep 22, 2021

Atlantic City Electric announced a major climate change commitment, launching a multi-faceted, action-oriented effort to help the state of New Jersey achieve its clean energy and climate goals. As part of the commitment, Atlantic City Electric will focus on actionable measures to reduce its greenhouse gas footprint, deliver innovative solutions that will empower customers to meet their climate change objectives, and drive collaborative efforts with stakeholder and community partners to achieve greater greenhouse gas reduction across South Jersey, while continuing efforts to address the impacts of climate change.

“Climate change is real and is having an impact on New Jersey and its residents, today,” said Gary Stockbridge, Atlantic City Electric region president. “Recent flooding, tornados and severe storms have shown we need to take action now to help reinforce the local energy grid through smarter, stronger and cleaner technologies that will help ensure a clean and healthy environment for the future. We know we can’t do this alone, but we recognize the positive impact we can have in helping to be an important part of the change.”

As a first step, Atlantic City Electric is taking action to shrink its own carbon footprint as quickly and efficiently as possible while ensuring resilience and assessing the readiness of the local energy grid to support a more efficient and electrified economy. Just last month, Atlantic City Electric joined its sister Exelon utilities in committing to reducing operations related emissions by 50%, as compared to a 2015 baseline, by 2030 and to ultimately achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 as part of the Exelon Utilities-wide “Path to Clean” commitment.

Key Atlantic City Electric commitments include:

• Transitioning to clean energy use for its own buildings, including purchasing 50% carbon-free electricity by 2025, and supporting the 100% clean energy goal of New Jersey by 2050.
• Installing energy efficient lighting at all Atlantic City Electric office buildings and substation facilities as the company  works to modernize its buildings through 2025.
• Completing energy audits to identify additional energy savings opportunities at its major facilities, including the Atlantic Regional Office in Mays Landing.
• Electrifying 50% of the company’s passenger vehicles and medium-duty fleet by 2030.
• Installing additional workplace electric vehicle charging infrastructure.
• Reducing SF6 Impacts by using non SF6 containment equipment wherever possible and enhance monitoring and equipment modernization to help reduce SF6 emissions from existing equipment.
• Activating company employees to encourage the use of public transportation and rideshare, and to measure and improve their own individual GHG footprint.
• Enhancing the overall resilience of company infrastructure and continuing to assess impacts of climate change on the electric system, taking action to mitigate climate risk and investing to make the grid smarter, stronger and cleaner.

In addition to the steps Atlantic City Electric is taking to enhance its operations, the company has committed to helping its customers achieve their climate change goals by empowering them to manage their energy use, take advantage of clean and renewable technologies and reduce emissions through a number of innovative products and programs the company plans to offer, including:

• New energy efficiency programs were recently launched providing a series of services and tools, including specific opportunities for limited-and moderate-income households, to take control of their energy use and save money.
• Launching a new Energy Marketplace to provide quick and easy access to discounted energy efficient products like LED bulbs, thermostats, advanced power strips, and more.
• Simplifying the switch to solar by improving interconnection processes and enhancing the customer solar toolkit to provide a one-stop shop for solar applications as well as the company’s online solar hosting capacity map.
• Providing off-peak rates and other incentives to encourage customers to make the switch to cleaner, more efficient electric vehicles.
• Making the local energy grid smarter through Atlantic City Electric’s Smart Energy Network program providing numerous benefits for customers such as restoring service faster and more efficiently, avoiding power outages in some cases all together, and enabling new tools and information to help customers have more control and make more informed decisions about their energy usage.

As part of this initiative, Atlantic City Electric also will continue to collaborate with government, community, civic, and non-profit partners across New Jersey on innovative actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, save money and energy, and build resilience.

The initiatives Atlantic City Electric plans to engage with partners across New Jersey include:

• Enabling solar for income-limited customers by continuing participation in a pilot program that will help advance a more robust community solar program across South Jersey.
• Creating shade and planting energy saving trees through a continuous partnership with the National Arbor Day Foundation to provide free trees for Atlantic City Electric customers and communities.
• Advancing solar, storage and other non-wires solutions by working with the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities and other stakeholders to facilitate the interconnection of additional clean and renewable energy sources and technologies, like battery storage and smart inverters, to enhance grid operations, as well as deploying battery technology to enhance reliability and resilience.
• Supporting New Jersey’s offshore wind development by working with offshore wind developers to facilitate interconnections to Atlantic City Electric’s transmission system and participating in PJM’s process to build transmission to support offshore wind development.
• Awarding $75,000 in grants annually through Atlantic City Electric’s Sustainable Community Grants program, in partnership with Sustainable Jersey, to help communities preserve open space and build resilience.
• Growing the local clean energy workforce by expanding curriculum associated with company workforce development programs to include energy efficiency and clean energy technology, like solar and wind.
• Engaging and educating students on climate change through the N.J. Student Climate Challenge, a partnership between Atlantic City Electric, the Drumthwacket Foundation and Sustainable Jersey, where we are fostering the growing role young people have in addressing the climate crisis.
• Readying the local energy grid for future clean energy resources through an ongoing analysis and modeling to understand the investments needed to support the growth of distributed energy resources like solar, electric vehicles, and battery storage.

Customers, community partners and local stakeholders interested in learning more about Atlantic City Electric’s Climate Commitment can visit atlanticcityelectric.com/Climate.

To access more business news, visit NJB News Now.

Related Articles: