The California Solar and Storage Association (CALSSA) issued a formal complaint to the California Public Utilities Commission against two of the state’s largest investor-owned electric utilities for alleged failure to comply with state-mandated interconnection application timelines.
CALSSA requested the Commission fine Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) and Southern California Edison (SCE) $1o million for noncompliance.
Rooftop solar customers must request utility approval to install the equipment. Utilities review interconnection applications to ensure the grid has proper infrastructure to support the export of electricity from customer rooftop solar systems. The state mandates that utilities perform the review process within specified timelines.
CALSSA said that the two utilities routinely ignore the state-mandated timelines, causing extensive delays for solar installations. This leads to raised costs for ratepayers as they balance financing and construction costs for the solar project but cannot yet reduce their electricity purchases from the utilities until they get permission to operate the system.
“There are clear rules on how long the utilities can take for their review, but there has been zero enforcement of those rules,” said Kevin Luo, policy and market development manager, CALSSA. “PG&E and SCE get away with suppressing what they consider to be their competition.”
The California Public Utilities Commission created a standard in 2020 that requires utilities to meet the established interconnection and system approval timelines for at least 95% of pending projects. The utilities are required to report compliance rates in their quarterly reports. For three steps of the mandated process, utilities have had compliance rates as low as 27%, and timelines for three other steps are met only 53%-81% of the time, according to their quarterly reports. The rates have not improved over time since the 2020 order.
“It is clear that if PG&E and SCE are not held accountable, they will continue to flagrantly ignore requirements that are intended to make them provide reasonable customer service,” said Luo.
CALSSA said it expects an administrative law judge at the state commission to review the complaint in the coming months and determine whether fines are warranted.
California’s large investor-owned utilities have long taken an anti-rooftop solar stance and blamed rooftop solar as a cause for high electricity rates in the state. However, CALSSAover the last 20 years, despite flat electricity usage, transmission and distribution spending by utilities has increased 300%.
According to the California Public Utilities Commission, the state’s three largest electric utilities PG&E, SCE and SDGE have raised customer rates by 110%, 90% and 82%, respectively, over the last decade. CALSSA said the fundamental structure of private utilities in the state has created a perverse inventive to spend inefficiently. The more capital that utilities spend on infrastructure, the more they can get electricity rate increases approved. The more rates are increased, the larger the profits.
“Getting the utility to stop fighting customer solar is ultimately the thing that is needed in California and around the world,” said CALSSA Policy Director Brad Heavner.
In another ongoing case, the California Supreme Court sent a case back down to the Appeals court, ordering another review of the decision to cut rooftop solar net metering rates. The policy shift lowered the potential electricity bill savings of investing in rooftop solar by an average of about $63 per month.
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