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SB 700 Passes California Assembly – SGIP Program Extended Five Years

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

The final days of the California legislative session have been big ones for clean energy. First, the Assembly passed a 100% renewable portfolio standard (RPS) on Tuesday. On Wednesday, they moved on to extend the Self Generation Incentive Program (SGIP) for five years, as well as adding $700 million in additional funding.

Now the bill will go back to the Senate for a concurrence vote and then on to Governor Jerry Brown for his signature. There are not expected to be any blips in that process.

As the California Public Utilities Commission says on its website:

The CPUC’s Self-Generation Incentive Program (SGIP) provides incentives to support existing, new, and emerging distributed energy resources. SGIP provides rebates for qualifying distributed energy systems installed on the customer’s side of the utility meter.

For consumer-sited solar, that typically means batteries.

Bill sponsor. Senator Scott Wiener, had this to say to SolarWakeup after the bill passed:

“We are one step closer to meeting our aggressive renewable energy goals,” said Senator Wiener. “By expanding our use of energy storage we will be able to use solar power every hour of the day, not just when the sun is shining. This bill will also help to expand solar use in every city and neighborhood in California, not just those that can afford it. SB 700 will ensure that all communities benefit from these rebates and from an increase in renewable energy.”

“We are making the sun shine at night!” said Bernadette Del Chiaro, executive director of the California Solar and Storage Association, the 500-member clean energy business group that has championed SB 700 for the past two years. ”SB 700 will do for storage what SB 1 did for solar over a decade ago, namely create a mainstream market by driving up demand and driving down costs all while creating jobs and clean energy choices for consumers.”

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Reaction from across the California solar industry was positive.

“Today’s Assembly vote to pass Senate Bill 700 is a win for clean energy and for all Californians,” said Alex McDonough, Vice President of Public Policy at Sunrun. “Sunrun has seen demand for home solar paired with batteries grow rapidly in recent years, as homeowners seek increased control over their energy bills and security for their families during power outages. We now look forward to the Senate’s concurrence on this important legislation that will unlock the incredible value that home batteries can provide for all Californians and our electricity grid.”

“Storage is an essential piece of building a carbon-free electric sector, and we applaud the Assembly for recognizing its role in our clean energy economy and passing SB700,” said Susannah Churchill, Vote Solar’s California Director. “Solar and storage are like peanut butter and chocolate: great on their own and even better together. We’re inspired by the last two days of forward-thinking among our California lawmakers and encourage continued momentum toward a fully decarbonized power sector. That means passing AB 893 and AB 813, which are both critical pieces of legislation to move the state and the country forward on clean energy and climate.”

“We are thrilled to see SB700 pass the Assembly,” said Rick Umoff, SEIA’s California state director. “This is a measure that we were proud to support because it will grow customer-sited energy storage, create local jobs and offer more tools to stabilize the grid. Our members and their customers will have an easier time deploying critical storage technology to the betterment of low income and disadvantaged communities, schools, hospitals and homes among others. We applaud CALSSA for the work it did to get this measure through the Assembly and we urge speedy passage in the Senate and enactment by Governor Brown.”

The Coming Battle: FERC Rules Storage Consumers Can’t Be Treated Differently Than Others By Utilities

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?”

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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.

More:

FERC says SCE can’t treat storage customers differently in service

IPPs Are Starting To Bet Heavily On The Solar + Storage Game

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

It’s easy to get caught up in a solar + storage discussion that only focuses on batteries – but as independent power producers (IPPs) begin to realize how important solar + storage is going to be in their market, they are quickly realizing the question is far more complex than it seems on the surface.

IPPs like Vistra, for example, just signed a deal with FlexGen, an innovative storage provider that is focusing on adding storage to C&I and utility-scale projects, to design and integrate a 10-megawatt/42-megawatt hour FlexGen energy storage system (ESS) at Upton 2 Solar Power Plant in Texas.

When completed in late 2018, the energy storage system, using FlexGen’s Hybrid OS software, will allow Vistra to store inexpensive solar energy generated during the day and deliver it to customers during evening hours when demand is greatest, improving grid reliability. The lithium-ion energy storage project at Upton 2 will be the largest in Texas, and the seventh largest in the United States.

Vistra is seen to include storage in many more ways going forward especially in markets like New York and California according to their investor’s day presentation. In California alone, Vistra sees the potential of 4.5GW – 8.8GW of energy storage penetration.

With project financing at a premium, finding new and innovative ways to add storage to projects that enhance financing success is the next frontier of the storage race – and IPPs are racing forward into it with wild abandon.

FlexGen, which has been in operation for nearly a decade, is in a position to capitalize on a growing market where consolidation has already taken some of the biggest names off the market. The company has a unique capability to also work on DC-coupled projects, where systems place storage devices between the solar modules and the inverter, instead of the traditional configuration of putting it behind the inverter. It means there are fewer components to install, meaning there are fewer parts to break down. In addition, you eliminate the unnecessary step of converting DC power to AC power (at the inverter) and then back to DC power (at the storage level) and then back to AC to deliver the electricity to the offtaker.

Every storage project is different, based on the market dynamics that create the revenue flow. The solar and power industry is seeing the future is more complicated than calling the lithium manufacturers and having batteries sent to the site. The system, power electronics and software need to work in sync to ensure total life cycle operations match the modeled expectations.

Liberty Utilities Wants To Own Your Behind-The-Meter Battery System (And Why That’s A Bad Idea)

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

Liberty Utilities, New Hampshire’s largest utility currently has a docket before the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission that sounds like a good idea.

At issue is the state’s largest pilot program in history that would allow New Hampshire solar users to install batteries at no cost to them. Sounds good, right?

And although the intent of the program – to see how batteries will affect grid resiliency and performance – is pretty benign, solar advocates in the state have concerns about the size of the program and what it could mean for the long-term future of battery storage in the Granite State.

After all, the proposal as it is currently written gives only customers with utility-owned batteries access to time-of-use rates or monthly peak reduction payments, meaning the goal of the pilot program isn’t really to test how batteries operate on the grid. It’s to give the utility an unnecessary monopoly on battery storage, which should be granted only when a clear market failure demands it.

Instead of attempting to grab new monopoly powers where they don’t clearly exist, advocates suggest that Liberty Utilities should scale back its own pilot program and let other companies – in some cases local companies employing New Hampshire citizens – compete on a “Bring Your Own Battery” system. In other words, set rates based on performance and let the market – not a state-sponsored monopoly – decide who should handle the solar + storage systems in the state.

As it is, battery storage is something new for monopoly utilities in most cases (and most certainly in Liberty Utilities’ case), whereas multiple companies in the private sector are already deploying solar + storage in many states, giving them insights into the particular challenges and opportunities such systems provide. Why should New Hampshire residents become the guinea pigs for a large-scale pilot program that would effectively shut out the competition?

No one is suggesting Liberty Utilities shouldn’t set up a pilot program or that that the NHPUC shouldn’t grant them one. But make it a reasonably sized one that forces utilities to compete in the market – which would allow all ratepayers, solar consumers and non-solar consumers alike, to win.