California Climate & Energy Collaborative

Snapshot of Energy Efficiency Performance Incentives for Electric Utilities

Sarina Soor
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Performance incentive mechanisms (PIMs) are one of the various policies that incentive enery efficiency. ACEEE’s research finds that PIMs are among the most important factors contributing to higher savings and increasing utility energy savings year to year. They can be structured to provide business opportunities that are competitive with what utilities can earn through investments…

California Utilities ordered to reopen grid maps

Sarina Soor
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“There’s an unfolding conflict between the state’s investor-owned utilities and distributed energy resources providers in California that highlights the complexities of sharing utility data with the broader world. Last month, we introduced our GTM Squared readers to the strange case of California’s disappearing Integrated Capacity Analysis maps. In simple terms, the conflict can be summed…

Barriers to non-utility ownership of DER stripped from California bill

Sarina Soor
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“SB 1088, which would have effectively barred customer or third-party owned solar or batteries from providing reliability services for the distribution system has been altered before leaving the Senate Appropriations Committee. The new bill does include a section that requires utilities to submit reliability and resiliency plans, including a requirement for utilities to investigate microgrids…

Center for Climate Protection launches national renewable energy laboratory project

Sarina Soor
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“This project will deliver a tool that can produce rate structures to incentivize deployment of DERs including distributed solar photovoltaics, energy efficiency, energy storage, electric vehicles, and demand response technologies. The project will create a DER rate structure design tool that captures the value of DER projects; can be readily adopted, customized, and updated by…

California energy regulators delve into threats and opportunities of ‘Customer Choice’

Sarina Soor
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“The CPUC explores potential pitfalls and solutions to utilities losing customers to distributed energy providers, community choice aggregators. As a regulator with the mission to keep energy affordable, reliable and decarbonized, the CPUC’s main concern was how these trends are taking market share and power away from the state’s investor-owned utilities, which it regulates, and…

A regional grid helps, not hurts distributed renewable energy

Sarina Soor
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“A regional grid operator makes managing each renewable energy generator’s variable output easier to coordinate and creates more value that can be shared by utility customers and renewable energy developers. It does this by blending renewable power from across the West, including the output from many smaller customer-owned or community-based systems located on dispersed distribution…

Valuing Distributed Energy Resources: Combined Heat and Power and the Modern Grid

Sarina Soor
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Distributed energy resources such as combined heat and power (CHP) could help communities avoid or minimize some impacts of large-scale natural disasters including blackouts. ACEEE’s new white paper, Valuing Resilient Distributed Energy Resources: Combined Heat and Power and the Modern Grid, proposes a new metric to help decision makers better assess the costs of disruptive…

The rise of Distribution Resources Planning – May 17

Sarina Soor
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In a follow-up to January’s webinar on Distribution Resources Planning, Outreach Director John Bernhardt, along with E9 Insight’s Cameron Brooks, will give an update on how new distribution grid planning processes are necessary as more distributed energy resources are integrated. They will: Detail key components of Distribution Resources Planning and discuss how states are initiating…