Ruling by California Public Utilities Commission Establishes Process to Resolve Issues with Critical Grid Data Needed for Clean Energy Transition
The California Public Utilities Commission issued a long-awaited decision that represents an important and positive step toward remedying longstanding challenges with the accuracy and timeliness of public grid data from the state’s investor-owned utilities—data that is essential for enabling California to meet its ambitious climate, clean energy, and electric vehicle targets.
The Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC), which participated extensively in the process leading to this ruling, commends the Commission’s decision to require a series of public workshops to discuss grid data accuracy issues, among other improvements, and to require the utilities to file a remediation plan to address those issues. This process presents an opportunity to realize the full potential of California’s public grid data as a critical tool for advancing clean energy and electrification and fostering a culture of transparency for utility grid data. However, to be successful, it will be important for the Commission to carefully monitor the process and hold the state’s utilities accountable for timely improvements.
These decisions are part of a broader ruling in which the Commission made several important updates to how utilities plan for grid upgrades (distribution system planning) in the context of increasing electrification. The grid data portion of the ruling addresses California’s Integration Capacity Analysis (ICA), a model of the electric distribution grid that shows where new energy generation (such as solar energy systems) or load (such as electric vehicle chargers or building electrification upgrades) can be added without the need for costly grid infrastructure upgrades.
The ICA allows developers to determine optimal locations for clean energy projects that will not trigger costly and time-consuming grid upgrades—but only if the data accurately reflects the real conditions on the electric grid. Despite the investment of significant ratepayer funds in the ICA and nearly a decade of work by utilities and public interest advocates, California’s public utilities are still not publishing accurate ICA data. For example, Southern California Edison’s (SCE) ICA contains clearly erroneous values for load and the utility has no clear plan to remedy this problem. In addition, SCE is not publishing or using ICA results for nearly 30% of its grid with no definitive timeline for a resolution. Additionally, neither SCE nor Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) is updating its ICA at the required frequency, meaning developers may be using outdated information to make project siting decisions.
In the ruling, the Commission recognizes that “improved oversight” is crucial to making the ICA a reliable tool for load and generation customers seeking to connect clean energy to the grid, and it establishes a series of workshops to correct “all known and identified issues” with the ICA. The ruling also requires each investor-owned utility to file a biannual report that describes all known ICA accuracy issues, any missing or erroneous ICA values for both generation and load, and specific remediation plans and timelines for these known issues. Finally, the ruling makes a number of enhancements to the online ICA portals that will increase the ICA’s usefulness and accessibility for customers.
In addition to offering an important pathway for accelerating cost-effective clean energy deployment, these ICA improvements also have significant implications for California’s ability to meet its ambitious electric transportation goals—especially for electric trucks. These include California’s Advanced Clean Fleets rule, which requires operators of trucking fleets to fully transition their fleets to zero-emission vehicles by 2030, and its Advanced Clean Trucks rule, which requires zero-emission vehicles to be an increasing percentage of manufacturers’ medium- and heavy-duty vehicle (i.e., truck) sales every year.
Because the chargers needed for these medium- and heavy-duty electric vehicles require significant amounts of power, connecting them to the grid often requires infrastructure upgrades. As recently reported by Canary Media, those upgrades can take many years—creating a major bottleneck for developing the charging infrastructure needed to make these electric truck mandates possible. In the face of these long upgrade timelines, the ICA offers one of the only pathways to quickly locating sites for medium- and heavy-duty EV chargers: If the ICA is accurate, developers can use them to find locations on the grid that can accommodate the additional load without upgrades.
IREC looks forward to participating in the workshop process to remedy the current issues with California’s ICA and achieve the accuracy necessary to support these important use cases. Because the ruling does not establish binding timelines or specific metrics of success, it will be important that the Commission remains attentive to the process and requires accountability to ensure efficient progress and that all issues are resolved.
California has some of the strongest requirements for public grid data; its ICA has the potential to be a powerful catalyst for faster and more cost-efficient deployment of clean energy and electric vehicle charging infrastructure to meet the state’s ambitious climate and energy goals. The Commission’s decision to require a process to fully resolve inaccuracies in the data utilities are publishing is a promising step toward realizing this potential.
Interstate Renewable Energy Council | irecusa.org