The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) filed a proposal with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) that will address longstanding concerns with monopoly utilities by enhancing competition under the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA).
SEIA’s proposal would bring competition into the PURPA legislation by providing utilities with relief from their mandatory purchase obligation, if they run fair competitive solicitations for the capacity needs identified in their integrated resource plans.
“It’s consumers who are harmed by the lack of competition with their local utility,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of SEIA. “We know utilities are adding more low-cost solar to their portfolios every year, but they aren’t always passing savings on to their customers. SEIA’s proposal will bring more competition and better prices to utilities around the country.”
If passed, the proposal provides utilities with a new framework for offering competitive solicitations based on their integrated resource plans, while also complying with PURPA’s requirement to purchase energy and capacity from small renewable and cogeneration facilities. SEIA’s competitive bidding solution is designed to prevent utility self-dealing while opening the market for new capacity to independent developers.
SEIA’s proposal:
- Calls on FERC to strengthen its oversight and enforcement of PURPA to prevent discrimination against independent solar facilities;
- Requests that FERC take action to ensure states are properly implementing PURPA by requiring that solar developers can sign a purchase contract for a financeable term; and
- Asks FERC to increase transparency in avoided cost calculations and make such information publicly available on a utility’s website, as already required by PURPA.
Taken together, this proposal offers a path forward to modernize PURPA in a way that relies upon greater competition and more transparency, resulting in better outcomes for both regulators and customers, SEIA officials said.
“FERC must close the loopholes that allow utilities to skirt competition and states to be lax in their implementation of PURPA’s key tenets,” said Katherine Gensler, VP of regulatory affairs for SEIA. “Solar developers bring competition — and better prices — to areas of the country that do not participate in wholesale electricity markets. FERC adopting and enforcing SEIA’s proposal for PURPA reform would be a win for utilities, consumers and renewable interests.”
News item from SEIA
paul kangas says
A good solution to the climate Emergency would be for homeowners to replace single family
homes with a 4-plex home with 100 solar panels.
California now has such a law pending to allow 4-plex homes to be built on a single family lot,
to increase housing near transportation hubs.
This would create millions of independent solar generators, & so DECENTRALIZE energy
generation to bring millions of dollars to solar home owners.
This would help pay the mortgages & so lower the cost of housing by making money
from the sun.
This would help create a solar economy. San Luis Obisbo County could easily generate
more energy from a million 4-plex solar homes, than comes from Diablo Canyon.
Thus replacing the energy from solar by 2022, so the reactor could be shut down by 2024.
Paul Kangas is a co-founder of Solar Justice, a solar advocacy group in SF.
We are build a 4-plex home with 100 solar panels in Paradise, Ca.
This model was developed in Germany in 1990 by Hans Joseph Fell
& Hermann Scheer. Read: “Energy Imperative”.
Solarman says
Paul kangas, you might want to look at what the large IOUs in California are doing to dilute the value of solar PV on one’s roof. SCE, SDG&E, PG&E have some kind of TOU in place. So, say from 3PM to 9PM you get electricity rate spiking for any use in that time period. It’s not necessarily uniform, depending on who and where the power is purchased from. The electricity price can go up two, three maybe even four times the ‘regular residential’ electricity cost during the day. There are court cases that have been filed across the U.S. wanting a change from net metering to net billing. I don’t think it is a matter of (if) it happens, it is a matter of when. So, now you get a credit of ‘retail electricity rate’ for every kWh a solar PV system pushes excess generation back onto the grid. Net billing will be at the wholesale electric rate for energy credits and when the TOU kicks in, it will eat up the ‘wholesale’ credits and cost you two to four times more per kWh used in the TOU time frame. There is NOTHING to keep the utilities from moving or extending the TOU. Right now you have net metering and a 6 hour TOU just as solar PV generation is tailing off for the day. Later on folks will install energy storage and use arbitrage to use off peak electricity to charge their energy storage late night to early morning, for use the next day before the solar PV begins effective solar generation for the home. The utilities will now extend the TOU to say 12 hours and shift the period from 12PM to 12AM, effectively cutting off your off peak time of day. It’s coming, you’ll soon see.