Today the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a final order to approve Southern California Edison’s (SCE) Wholesale Distribution Access Tariff proposal. Following more than two years of negotiation, SEIA succeeded in reducing the wires charge for standalone energy storage from SCE’s original proposal, opening the door for significant storage growth in the territory.
The first-of-its-kind wires charge proposed by SCE would have drastically reduced the economic feasibility of all storage resources that are connected at the distribution level and participate in the CAISO market. The agreement that SEIA negotiated with SCE allows near-term resources to come online as planned.
“After a long, two-year negotiation with Southern California Edison (SCE), SEIA and its members were able to secure a 60% reduction in SCE’s proposed wires charge for standalone energy storage, clearing the way for more storage deployment and a cleaner, more reliable grid in California. Without this agreement, storage for utility-scale solar customers would not be feasible in one of the largest utility territories in the country,” said Gizelle Wray, director of regulatory affairs and counsel for SEIA, in a statement. “As written, the proposal would have set a dangerous precedent for unnecessary access fees and would have had a chilling effect on energy storage deployment across the country.
“By securing this reduced charge, we’ve helped preserve the regulatory intent of FERC Orders 841 and 2222, which pave the way for distribution resources to have fair access to wholesale markets. Solar and storage add reliability and resilience to the grid, and SEIA will continue its work to ensure that utilities don’t attempt to add more unnecessary and onerous fees for market participants to use their wires,” she continued.
News item from SEIA
Storageman says
Shoutout the the California Energy Storage Alliance (CESA) team which did a TON of the work on this.
Solarman says
““By securing this reduced charge, we’ve helped preserve the regulatory intent of FERC Orders 841 and 2222, which pave the way for distribution resources to have fair access to wholesale markets. Solar and storage add reliability and resilience to the grid, and SEIA will continue its work to ensure that utilities don’t attempt to add more unnecessary and onerous fees for market participants to use their wires,” she continued.””
I believe if one follows the money from the installation of infrastructure to the “end of life” of that infrastructure you will find it has been and will continue to be on the “backs of the ratepayers” and has ‘never’ been the utility’s “wires”. As a business model goes, most of these electric utilities operate this way: A developer moves into an area and buys up land, the utilities as a whole get involved at some level and the developer lays in infrastructure to the specifications of local, regional and State laws with the final inspection done by the “utility” before “accepting” the new infrastructure installation as their own. As a ‘new’ asset of the local electric company, the company is allowed depreciation of ‘assets’ on their tax bills and are allowed to levy line and maintenance charges bundled on every electric bill paid by the ratepayer end users. Over a period of time though it seems the IOU entities will make the decision to increase dividends over O&M and you end up with a poorly maintained system like PG&E that has sparked fires to cause 88 lives lost so far. I’m thinking PG&E may not be an extreme case and folks in ‘other’ States could suffer the same results sooner or later from their local electric utilities.
As the story is told here and the mention of FERC 841 and 2222, it seems like SEIA is going to “help” the IOU electric companies push the residential solar PV installation into the “net billing” market where any excess solar PV produced during the daylight hours will be credited at the ‘wholesale’ electricity rate and not at the residential or “adjusted” residential electricity rate, taking into account the solar PV homeowner also has to pay for the system components, have them installed, maintained, repaired and insure the system. Where’s MY O&M charges on every kWh of excess energy pushed back onto the grid? Where’s my system depreciation over the life of the system? When one goes on to install smart ESS to their system, where’s my fee for being able to provide distributed energy storage to the grid with demand signals creating an aggregate VPP, drawing extra energy from (my) ESS to meet the utility’s grid services?