By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent
The new battle lines are being drawn, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) gave consumers a victory yesterday as utilities struggle to come to grips with customer-sited energy storage.
For years, utilities have tried, using various methods, to treat solar consumers as a separate class of customer, giving them the right to charge extra fees (among other mechanisms) that they charge to no other customer in their ratepayer base. These efforts, by and large, have been met with appropriate scorn by public utilities commissions around the country and have been rejected.
Now, however, a new front is opening, and it concerns energy storage consumers and curtailment, and the utilities are at it again.
In this specific case, Southern California Edison (SCE) brought its curtailment plan to FERC and asked if it could treat storage consumers differently than other consumers by charging an additional fee for “wholesale distribution access.” FERC, appropriately, said, “Greedy utilities say what now?”
Through our invaluable friends at Utility Dive, we get this from FERC:
SoCal Edison has failed to demonstrate why it is just and reasonable and not unduly discriminatory or preferential to curtail one class of interconnection customer’s load (in this case, an energy storage device’s Charging Demand) without providing an opportunity to have the energy storage device’s load studied and to pay for the system upgrades needed to allow its load to have the same curtailment priority as other wholesale loads.”
In other words, get the heck out of here with that weak nonsense.
Of course, SCE has 30 days to get its ducks in a row and try again (say, by doing the study that FERC says is necessary), but the initial finding protects energy storage customers from being targeted by utilities looking to recoup losses from other investments, and it protects distributed-generation options for the moment. Kudos to FERC for doing the right thing.
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FERC says SCE can’t treat storage customers differently in service