ORIGINAL REPORTING: How New York is incentivizing utilities to interconnect DERs under REV

How New York is incentivizing utilities to interconnect DERs under REV; Regulators want to reward utilities for better performance on key tasks like DER interconnection — the question is how?

Herman K. Trabish, April 6, 2017 (Utility Dive)

Editor’s note: The most recent discussions from New York and California have begun to include questions about how to simplify and stream policy complexities

New York regulators continue to work to perfect a mechanism to reward the state’s utilities for the accelerated interconnection of distributed energy resources. If regulators and stakeholders can come to a consensus, it could mark a big step forward in evolving how New York utilities make money, supporting a directive from the New York Public Service Commission (PSC) in the state’s Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) initiative to remake the utility business model. Streamlined interconnection of DERs is one of the areas regulators identified early in the REV process as an opportunity for utilities to make extra revenue based on their performance. The March order (Case 16-M-0429) aims to make that new ratemaking a reality.

click to enlarge

Regulators are weighing input from utilities and DER providers on how to measure utility performance. In their order, they rejected elements of proposals from utilities and solar advocates and directed the parties to resubmit better ideas about Earning Adjustment Mechanism (EAM) metrics to reward utilities for getting distributed resources online faster. Interconnection performance is the first EAM topic to be tackled by New York stakeholders, but regulators said in earlier orders that other performance incentives will involve data sharing, customer engagement, efficiency offerings and more. In response to a 2016 commission order, the state’s utilities proposed metrics and a survey of developer satisfaction to measure performance on the interconnection of DER projects. But regulators, in their new ruling, said the plan for the survey and metric does not go far enough. The state’s utilities still see merit in the concept and solar developers agree… click here for more

click to enlarge

Tweet

NO QUICK NEWS