Calif. Public Utilities Commission issues final version of customer Choice Paper

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) issued the final version of its customer Choice Paper this week, which addresses the changing electric market in California and the resulting new challenges.

The paper aims to increase awareness of the opportunities and challenges in California’s electricity market, engage stakeholders and advance a public dialogue to enable continued reliable, clean and affordable electricity for customers and equitable treatment for all market participants.

The report notes the regulatory challenges that stem from an increase in distributed energy resources, the growth of non-utility load serving entities, and policy measures taken to mitigate climate change, which have provided customers with many options regarding how they obtain electric services.

“Fewer and fewer customers are getting power from the traditional large regional utilities and the central decision making that we use for keeping the grid reliable, safe and affordable is splintering, becoming the task of dozens of decision-makers,” CPUC President Michael Picker wrote in the cover letter to the report.

“In the last deregulation, we had a plan, however flawed. Now, we are deregulating electric markets through dozens of different decisions and legislative actions, but we do not have a plan. If we are not careful, we can drift into another crisis,” Picker wrote.

The release of the final paper follows more than a year of stakeholder input and guidance through the Choice Paper’s Ad Hoc Advisory Committee. The final version includes non-material changes inspired by written comments submitted by numerous stakeholders and the remarks of participants at public workshops.

The CPUC will now continue to work with other state leadership and stakeholders in planning for California’s energy future. The commission will perform a gap analysis to examine the fundamental questions raised in the Choice Paper to identify critical issues requiring solutions. A public workshop will be held in October 2018 to discuss the findings of the gap analysis and a draft action plan as the framework for addressing these gaps.