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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It’s clear that CA cities & towns need to mandate solar parking lot canopies +BESS +Vehicle-2-BESS chargers at ALL large existing parking lots, within 5 years, right where most utility rate-payers live, work & commute, from large apartments & condos to shopping centers, business parks & various municipal facilities. No new utility transmission, site acquisition or other site improvement spending required. And no long permitting & interconnection delays or armies of litigious NIMBYS. And remember, all those big hot asphalt parking lots in your town were mandated by local government. All perfectly legal.
The benefits are so obvious that all the new healthcare facilities in my county have already covered 80% of their parking with solar canopies. Mundane Solar Abundance,…they get it! For a commercial solar canopy micro grid system costing $1 million, a 30% Federal Investment Tax Credit, MACRS accelerated depreciation, and an SGIP battery rebate reduce the net cost to about $470k, resulting in a payback period of less than 4 years. Even without subsidies, the payback period is less than 10 years. Now Walmart’s doing it!
California has done some very backhanded things. First they used to give you one for one credit for your solar and incentives. Then they turned around and they took the one for one credit away and gave you 50% credits but left me incentives. Then they turned around and took the incentives away but still let you have the 50% credit. Now they’re down to 25% credit and they’re talking about taking all the credits away. One of the main reasons why people got solar in California is because electricity is so expensive. The 121 credit made perfect sense because anything extra that you received from your solar the city got to use it situation and then when the sun went down when there was less draw on the electrical grid those credits would kick in so you wouldn’t have brownouts. What California is doing now has completely frustrated and aggravated its citizen so much so that they’ve decided to get battery packs and get completely off the grid to work and what that is ultimately done is led California literally shooting themselves in the foot because California will not only get the extra energy generated from solar then you’ll even get the taxes for being hooked up to the grid or the system. They’re greed lost them everything and it’s happening with thousands of their customers. Just shows you what green gets you!
Shows you what happens when the Utilities have a lot of lawyers.
We dont need anymore grid tie solar! We need battery backups, if your going solar, go off grid, we don’t want your duckbill.
Most expensive power there is same for wind gen. Corp. Got rich with discounts for other sections. Of their companies.
Quit continuing the big lie about wind,solar and save get rid of them there are cheaper more effective methods. R.E Yrjanson Washington State Windmill capital of the world.
What makes people think they are entitled to free power at the expense of double rates for everyone else? Unsustainable!