CPUC

mmaxer/Shutterstock

Today, the biggest electric utility in California, the largest car market in the country, took an important step to give drivers access to a cleaner fuel that’s roughly the equivalent of buck-a-gallon gasoline.  Pacific Gas & Electric (“PG&E”) has submitted a proposal for new and improved rate plans that encourage electric...[read more]

image via Abengoa

California currently has just 524 solar projects over 1 megawatt (MW) — but  an incredible 17,707 such solar projects will be on the grid by 2017 [PDF]. This is a huge change! And California is not the only state with such massive change coming.The U.S. is about to go through an incredible metamorphosis when it comes to energy...[read more]

Electric utilities and policymakers in Japan and Germany have been scrambling for months to find ways to compensate for nuclear power plants shut down in the aftermath of Fukushima.In both instances, fossil fuels are part of the stopgap solution to offset the declines in nuclear generation in the short term, but longer-term energy...[read more]

The California Public Utility Commission is accepting comments through January 25 and holding workshops February 8-10 on a proposal by Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to create the nation’s first statewide on-bill repayment (OBR) program for energy efficiency and solar energy upgrades to be financed entirely by third parties. The on-...[read more]

Both distributed solar energy and distributed energy storage have attributes that make their deployment desirable to society as a whole in addition to the customers who benefit from them most directly. A strong argument can be made, therefore, that in setting things such as “network use charges”, utilities and utility regulators should not impose the full costs of such systems on the customers who benefit from the systems most directly, but should instead be socializing the costs of those systems (or at least a portion of the costs) among all electricity consumers.[read more]

Big data is one of the buzz words tossed around in Smart Grid circles these days, and it will be the subject of discussion at a session I’ll host later this week. What exactly is it?  Like the universe itself, Smart Grid data is in an expansion phase.  Big Smart Grid data consists of large datasets enabled by the Smart Grid...[read more]

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) issued a proposed decision regarding the privacy and security of electricity usage data on May 6.  This proposal sets the stage for how consumer consumption data is managed by the three investor-owned utilities (IOUs) in California – Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California...[read more]

California’s Senate has just passed some important new renewable energy legislation that will, if approved in the Assembly and signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown, require utilities operating in the state to obtain one third of their electricity from renewable sources of energy such as wind, solar or geothermal. This is a big...[read more]

Are Californians forking over too much green for green energy?A new report from a ratepayers advocacy group found that the price of electricity in 59 percent of renewable energy contracts signed by the state’s three big utilities exceeded the market price referent, or MPR for all you utility junkies. Without getting into the nitty-gritty...[read more]

The California Public Utility Commission today approved an important new policy for California solar PV, the Renewable Auction Mechanism (RAM). As you may remember, RAM was originally proposed by the CPUC staff back in August of 2009 (I blogged about it and why I thought it was a much preferable alteranative to a Feed...[read more]