CPUC Delays Whether to Reject Edison’s Clean Resources Deals

Utility regulators this week postponed voting on a proposed decision to deny Southern California Edison rate recovery for 125 MW of energy efficiency, renewables and energy storage in the Los Angeles Basin

The proposed decision by a California Public Utilities Commission administrative law judge was pulled from the CPUC’s April 26 meeting consent calendar.

The tentative ruling concludes Edison’s 19 “preferred resources” contracts to provide local reliability are unnecessary and too costly for utility customers. The commission rescheduled the item for a May 10 vote.

The tentative CPUC ruling upsets clean energy advocates.

The ruling “paves the way for continued investments in the gas [power plant] fleet and sends a chilling signal to developers of preferred resource reliability products and load serving entities procuring resource adequacy that gas is the only answer,” the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies warns the commission in an April 20 filing.

Edison issued a request for offers to help fill in for the loss of 7,000 MW in the area created by the closure of its San Onofre nuclear plant and the ongoing phase-out of once through cooled coastal power plants. The utility also was responding to a CPUC decision ordering it to procure 170 MW of preferred resources as part of the commission’s Long Term Procurement Plan to demonstrate how clean distributed energy can work as reliably as gas-fired generation.

The grid operator initially concluded that the LA Basin was short on resources with the closure of traditional power plants. Then, the California Independent System Operator’s May 2017 analysis found an over-abundance of capacity in the area from 2018- 2022, to the tune of about 3,862 MW.

Edison, disagreed, saying CAISO’s analysis focuses on system and not local need. A utility analysis finds a local need for up to 275 MW by 2020.

The CPUC’s proposed ruling rejects the utility’s finding as unsupported. It sides with the Office of Ratepayer Advocates, which argues that no new capacity in the Los Angeles is needed. It also finds that Edison’s selected preferred resources contracts are too similar to other CPUC programs promoting clean energy.

In a mid-March response to the proposed ruling, the utility urges approval of rate recovery for its preferred resources contracts for numerous reasons.

The utility, for instance, argues that the procurement would inform Edison whether it could “procure, deploy, and rely upon large concentrations of preferred, locally sited [distributed energy resources] throughout its system when conventional generation is suddenly unavailable, as with the recent system constraints caused by the limited availability of the Aliso Canyon gas storage facility, the denial of the Puente gas-fired plant in Moorpark, and NRG’s recent announcement it intends to retire three gas-powered plants located in Southern California.” — Elizabeth McCarthy

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CPUC Delays Whether to Reject Edison’s Clean Resources Deals

William J. Kelly

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