Tag Archives: distributed energy resources

The utility revolution hits the mainstream

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This New Yorker article, “Power to the People,” is one of the first mainstream press articles discussing how the energy utility landscape is being transformed. (This was sent to me by one of my non-energy clients.) It prompted one thought: the “death spiral” only occurs if we hold on to the traditional model of utility investment and regulation. Allowing utility shareholders to participate in the transformation through their unregulated holding companies can mitigate much of the potential for a death spiral.

How Should Distributed Generation be Distributed?

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Bruce Mountain observes in the Comments that Australia already is experiencing deep solar penetration, but is not find extensive disruptions in the distribution networks.

Cheap energy storage may be parked in your garage

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One of the key questions about how to bring in more renewables is how do we provide low-cost storage? Batteries can cost $350 per kilowatt (kW) and pumped storage somewhat lower. Maybe we should think about another potential storage source that will be very low cost: automobiles.

California has about 24 million autos. The average horsepower is about 190 HP which converts to about 140 kW. Let’s assume that an EV will have on average a 100 kW engine. Generally cars are parked about 90% of the time, which of course varies diurnally. A rough calculation shows that about 2,000 GW of EV capacity is available with EVs at 100% of the fleet. To get to 22 GW of storage, about 1% of the state’s automobile fleet would need to be connected as storage devices. That seems to be an attainable goal. Of course, it may not be possible for the local grid to accommodate 100 kW of charging and discharging and current charging technologies are limited to 3 to 19 kW. So assuming an average of a 5 kW capability, having 20% of the auto fleet connected would still provide the 22 GW of storage that we might expect will be required to fully integrate renewables.

The onboard storage largely would be free–there probably are some opportunity costs in lower charging periods that would have to be compensated. The only substantial costs would be in installing charging stations and incorporating smart charging/storage software. I suspect those are the order of tens of dollars per kW.

Equity issues in TOU rate design

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I attended the Center for Research into Regulated Industries (CRRI) Western Conference last week, which includes many of the economists working on various energy regulatory issues in California. A persistent theme was the interrelationship of time-varying rates (TVR) and development of distributed generation like rooftop solar. One session was even entitled “optimal rates.” We presented a paper on developing the proper perspectives and criteria in valuing distributed solar resources in another session. (More on that in another post.)

With the pending CPUC decision in the residential ratemaking rulemaking, due July 3, time of use rates (TOU) rates were at the top of everyone’s mind. (With PG&E violations of the ex parte rules, the utilities were cautious about who they were presenting with at least one Commission advisor attending. At least one presentation was scotched for that reason.) Various results were presented, and the need for different design elements urged on efficiency grounds. In the end though I was struck most by two equity issues that seem to have been overlooked.

First, various studies have shown that TOU rates deliver larger savings for customers who have various types of automated response equipment such as smart thermostats (e.g., NEST) or smart appliances. Those customers will see bigger bill savings and may find that doing so is more convenient and comfortable. An underlying premise in these studies is that the customer is the decision maker. But for 45% of California’s residents–renters–that is not the case. As a result tenants, who tend to have lower incomes, are likely to be subsidizing home owners who are better equipped to benefit from TOU rates.

Tenants must rely on landlords to make those necessary investments. Landlords don’t pay the bills or realize the direct savings in what is called the “split incentive” problem. And landlords may be concerned that future tenants might not like the commitments that come with the new smart devices. For example, signing up for PG&E’s SmartAC program can face this barrier.

So in considering residential customer impacts, the CPUC should address the likely differential in opportunities and benefits between owner-customers and tenant-customers. Solutions might include rate design differences, or moving toward a model where energy service providers (ESP or ESCo) take over appliance ownership in multifamily buildings. This split incentive is endemic across many programs such as the solar initiative and energy efficiency.

Second, a fixed charge have been proposed to address the anticipated impact of solar net energy metering. The majority of costs to be covered are for the “customer services” that run from the flnal line transformer to the meter. (I’ve been focused on this segment while representing the Western Manufactured Housing Communities Association (WMA) on master-metering issues.) However, the investments in customer services are not uniform across residences. For older homes, the services or “line extensions” may have already been paid off (e.g., most homes built before 1975), and with inflation, the costs for newer homes can be substantially higher.

The fixed charge would be based on one of two methods. In current rate cases, the new or “marginal” cost for a line extension is the starting point of the calculation, and usually the cost is scaled up from that. However, given the depreciation and inflation, the utilities will receive much more revenue than what they are entitled to under regulated returns. In the second method, the average cost for all services will be applied to all customers. This solves the problem of excess revenues for the utility, but it does not address the subsidies that flow from customers in older homes to those in newer ones. Because the residents of older homes tend to be tenants and have lower incomes, this again is a regressive distribution of costs. Solutions might include no fixed charge at all, differences in rates by house vintage, or discounts in the fixed charge as SMUD has instituted.

Regardless, these types of subsidies flow the wrong direction.

Is the Future of Electricity Generation Really Distributed?

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Severin Borenstein at UC Energy Institute blogs about the push for distributed solar, perhaps at the expense of other cost-effective renewables development. My somewhat contrary comment on that is here: https://energyathaas.wordpress.com/2015/05/04/is-the-future-of-electricity-generation-really-distributed/#comment-8092

Reblog: CallMe Power – What is a community solar garden

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Here’s a good description of different types of community solar garden configurations:

You can read about community solar garden policies in one of my past blogs.

Smart, clean and local energy technologies for Davis

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Second in a series published in the Davis Enterprise on how the City of Davis can address its energy future:

Smart, clean and local energy technologies for Davis

Three key steps in designing rates for solar power

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KQED posted a good summary of how solar power is driving the residential rate design rulemaking at the CPUC. (M.Cubed works for EDF there.) I offer three steps that should be taken to address the issues of how to change ratemaking for a changing energy marketplace:

1) Consumers should see time varying prices (time of use or TOU being among that menu). Tiered rates make it impossible to see the current price for consumption, and tiered rates have been shown not to induce any additional conservation across the customer base. Consumer surveys show that customers want more control over their electricity use and the price signals to direct them.

2) Consumers should be offered a meaningful menu of rate options. This means rates that differ in risk exposure both over time of day and time horizon. Customers should be able to hedge against peak day prices or participate in demand response. They should be able to accept changes in hourly prices or buy a multi-year contract. Utilities already offer these contract options to their suppliers; why not treat their customers as they they are valued?

3) Any calculation of grid costs and responsibility should reflect the changing demand by consumers. The grid charges proposed by the utilities assume that future consumers will install the same-sized equipment as they do today and that they will consume in the same pattern. Solar panels are ready today to “island” a home from the network, and EV charging could create greater load diversity even at the circuit level. That will radically change utility investment. The distribution planning rulemaking is an important step toward resolving that issue but the CPUC hasn’t yet linked the proceedings.

Only the first issue is being addressed head on in the rulemaking and it hasn’t really delved into the importance of emerging consumer choice.

Reexamining growth and risk sharing for utilities

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Severin Borenstein at the Energy Institute at Haas blogged about the debate over moving to residential fixed charges, and it has started a lively discussion. I added my comment on the issue, which I repost here.

The question of recovery of “fixed” costs through a fixed monthly charge raises a more fundamental question: Should we revisit the question of whether utilities should be at risk for recovery of their investments? As is stands now if a utility overinvests in local distribution it faces almost no risk in recovering those costs. As we’ve seen recently demand has trended well below forecasts since 2006 and there’s no indication that the trend will reverse soon. I’ve testified in both the PG&E and SCE rate cases about how this has led to substantial stranded capacity. Up to now the utilities have done little to correct their investment forecasting methods and continue to ask for authority to make substantial “traditional” investment. Shareholders suffer few consequences from having too much distribution investment–this creates a one-sided incentive and it’s no surprise that they add yet more poles and wire. Imposing a fixed charge instead of including it as a variable charge only reinforces that incentive. At least a variable charge gives them some incentive to avoid a mismatch of revenues and costs in the short run, and they need to think about price effects in the long run. But that’s not perfect.

When demand was always growing, the issue of risk-sharing seemed secondary, but now it should be moving front and center. This will only become more salient as we move towards ZNE buildings. What mechanism can we give the utilities so that they more properly balance their investment decisions? Is it time to reconsider the model of transferring risk from shareholders to ratepayers? What are the business models that might best align utility incentives with where we want to go?

The lesson of the last three decades has been that moving away from direct regulation and providing other outside incentives has been more effective. Probably the biggest single innovation that has been most effective has been imposing more risk on the providers in the market.

California has devoted as many resources as any state to trying to get the regulatory structure right–and to most of its participants, it’s not working at the moment. Thus the discussion of whether fixed charges are appropriate need to be in the context of what is the appropriate risk sharing that utility shareholders should bear.

This is not a one-side discussion about how groups of ratepayers should share the relative risk among themselves for the total utility revenue requirement. That’s exactly the argument that the utilities want us to have. We need to move the argument to the larger question of how should the revenue requirement risk be shared between ratepayers and shareholders. The answer to that question then informs us about what portion of the costs might be considered unavoidable revenue responsibility for the ratepayers (or billpayers as I recently heard at the CAISO Symposium) and what portion shareholders will need to work at recovering in the future. As such the discussion has two sides to it now and revenue requirements aren’t a simple given handed down from on high.

Questions yet to be answered from the CAISO Symposium

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While attending the CAISO Stakeholder Symposium last week I had rush of questions, not all interconnected, about how we manage the transition to the new energy future. I saw two very different views about how the grid might be managed–how will this be resolved? How do we consider path dependence in choosing supporting and “bridge” resources? How do we provide differential reliability to customers? How do we allow utilities to invest beyond the meter?

Jesse Knight, former CPUC Commissioner and now chairman at SDG&E and SCG, described energy utilities as the “last monopoly” in the face of a rapidly changing economic landscape. (Water utilities may have something to say about that.) SDG&E is ahead of the other utilities in recognizing the rise of the decentralized peer-to-peer economy.  On the other hand, Clark Gellings from EPRI described a world in which the transmission operator would have to see “millions” of nodes, both loads and small generators, to operate a robust network. This view is consistent with the continued central management implied by the utility distribution planners at the CPUC’s distribution planning OIR workshop. At the end of the symposium, 3 of the 4 panelist said that the electricity system would be unrecognizable to Thomas Edison. I wonder if Alexander Graham Bell would recognize our telecommunications system?

One question posed to the first “townhall” panel asked what role natural gas would have in the transition to more renewables. I am not aware of any studies conducted on whether and how choices about generation technology today commits us to decisions in the future. Path dependence is an oft overlooked aspect of planning. We can’t make decisions independent of how we chose in the past. That’s why it’s so difficult to move away from fossil fuel dependence now–we committed to it decades ago. We shouldn’t ignore path dependence going forward. Building gas plants now may commit us to using gas for decades until the financial investments are recovered. We may be able to buy our way out through stranded asset payments, but we learned once before that wasn’t a particularly attractive approach. Using forethought and incorporating flexibility requires careful planning.

And along those lines in our breakout session, another question was posed about how to resolve the looming threat of “overgeneration” from renewables, particularly solar.  Much of the problem might be resolved by charging EVs during the day, but it’s unlikely that a sizable number of plug-in hybrids and BEVs will be on the road before the mid-2020s. So the question becomes should we invest in gas-fired generation or battery or pumped storage, both of which have 20-30 year economic lives, or try to find other shorter lived transitions including curtailment contracts or demand response technologies until EVs arrive on the scene? It might even be cost effective to provide subsidies to accelerate adoption of EVs so as to avoid long-lived investments that may become prematurely obsolete.

Pricing for differential reliability among customers also came up. Often ignored in the reliability debate at the CAISO is that the vast majority of outages are at the distribution level. We appear to be overinvested in transmission and generation reliability at the expense of maintaining the integrity of the local grid. We could have system reliability prices that reflect costs of providing flexible service to follow on-site renewable generation. However the utilities already recover most of the capital costs of providing those services through rate of return regulation. The market prices are suppressed (as they are in the real time market where the IOUs dump excess power) so we can’t expect to see good price signals, yet.

Several people talked about partnerships with the utilities in investing in equipment beyond the meter. But the question is will a utility be willing to facilitate such investments if they degrade the value of its current investment in the grid? Fiduciary responsibility under traditional return on capital regulation says only if the cost of the new technology is higher so as to generate higher returns than the current grid investment. That doesn’t sound like a popular recipe for a new energy future.  Instead, we need to come up with creative means of utility shareholders participating in the new marketplace without forcing them down the old regulatory path.

Margaret Jolly from ConEd noted that the stakeholders were holding conversations on the new future but “the customer was not in the room.” Community, political and business leaders who know how electricity is used were not highly evident, and certainly didn’t make any significant statements. I’ve written before about offering more rate options to customers. I wanted to hear more from Ellen Struck about the Pecan Street study, but her comments focused on the industry situation, not customers’ behaviors and choices.