The Energy Data Access Committee (EDAC)’s quarterly meeting was held in San Francisco this past Friday. Highlights from the meeting of potential interest to local governments include:
- Addition of second local government member to the Committee. Barry Hooper of the City and County of San Francisco had previously been the only local government representative on the EDAC. With this meeting, Cory Downs of the City of Chula Vista joined as the second local government representative.
- Troubleshooting the reconciling of different energy data for local government climate action planning: A San Luis Obispo County representative provided a very helpful case study to explain how receiving different versions of energy data can be a challenge for climate action planning – especially when the County relies on energy data for prioritizing and valuing different energy project options, and demonstrating that value to officials and to the community. The EDAC – including the CPUC and the utilities – will be reviewing this example to better understand how to address it. Potential areas for review include setting consistent protocols at the utility-level for separating out local government accounts, and better understanding how the Energy Data Review Program and the stricter data aggregation and anonymization rules put in place with the CPUC Decision 14-05-016) has changed the data shared.
- General data quality review and opportunities. The importance of understanding how different requirements around energy data access affect the quality and the utility of the data was discussed. There is interest in understanding whether local governments experience issues with data discrepancies with the new aggregation and anonymization rules, for example, and if so, who and how so.
Any local government staff (or member of the public) are welcome in any EDAC meeting. If you are interested in sharing input based on the above, or being notified of the next meeting, please contact jdecker@lgc.org.