The California Photo voltaic & Storage Affiliation (CALSSA) submitted a formal complaint on August 28 to the California Public Utilities Fee relating to customer support that’s far beneath established requirements on the state’s largest two utilities. The criticism asks for a effective of $10 million towards Pacific Gasoline & Electrical and Southern California Edison.
Prospects looking for to put in photo voltaic panels and batteries should request utility approval to put in the tools. Utilities evaluation interconnection purposes and ensure transformers and different components of the electrical grid are sufficiently big to deal with any power the shoppers ship to the utilities. The state mandates that utilities carry out varied steps in that evaluation course of inside specified timelines.
PG&E and SCE routinely ignore these timelines and trigger intensive delays for photo voltaic installations. This raises prices for shoppers as they stability financing and building prices and can’t cut back their power purchases from the utilities till they get utility permission to make use of their tools.
“There are clear guidelines on how lengthy the utilities can take for his or her evaluation, however there was zero enforcement of these guidelines,” mentioned Kevin Luo, coverage and market improvement supervisor for CALSSA. “PG&E and SCE get away with suppressing what they contemplate to be their competitors.”
The California Public Utilities Fee established a typical in 2020 that utilities meet the established timelines for 95% of initiatives and ordered the utilities to submit quarterly studies on their efficiency. These studies present that three steps of the evaluation course of have compliance charges as little as 27 to 45%, and timelines for 3 different steps are met solely 53 to 81% of the time. These charges haven’t improved over time because the 2020 order.
“It’s clear that if PG&E and SCE aren’t held accountable, they’ll proceed to flagrantly ignore necessities which are meant to make them present cheap customer support,” added Luo.
CALSSA expects an administrative legislation choose on the state fee to evaluation the criticism within the coming months and decide whether or not fines are warranted.
Information merchandise from the California Photo voltaic & Storage Affiliation
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