By Jeff St. John, Greentech Media
Michael Picker has spent part of his 11 months as president of the California Public Utilities Commission managing the aftermath of the alleged misdeeds of his predecessor. But as he oversees some of the biggest changes to California energy policy in over a decade, he’s also spent a good deal of time explaining his vision for greening the state with distributed energy, along with the distributed decision-making to make it work for the grid.
Since he was appointed in December, Picker has been stressing certain key policy philosophies for how the CPUC can help the state reach its carbon reduction and green energy goals. These include a preference for market-based solutions over technology mandates, a heavy emphasis on electric vehicles as part of the mix, and an enthusiasm for technologies that can manage lots and lots of distributed energy resources (DERs) in concert with the grid as a whole.
In a series of talks this month, Picker declined to discuss details of big proceedings under review, such as the CPUC’s net-metering reform, which has pitted the solar industry against the state’s big three investor-owned utilities. But he did sketch out a plan for managing the inevitable growth of intermittent renewable energy, whether from millions of rooftops or ever-cheaper utility-scale solar and wind projects.
Building the 21st Century Power System
By Ted Craver (Chairman, President & CEO of Edison International), EnergyBiz Magazine – Fall 2015
Imagine for a moment that you are a homeowner or a small-business owner and you just shelled out $25,000 or more for a shiny new rooftop solar generator. Then imagine your electric utility told you that you could not hook it up to the grid right away, not until your neighborhood circuit was upgraded. And even then, it said you could only turn it on during certain hours. I am guessing you would not be a happy customer.
As CEO of one of the nation’s largest electric power companies, I do not want to be in the business of telling our customers what they can install on their own properties and how they can use it. As utilities, we don’t control what customers put behind the meter. We don’t tell them what TVs and appliances they can buy. The same should apply to PV solar panels, home batteries and electric cars.
Our job as utilities is to provide the power network that enables customers to choose which energy technologies they want to use. At Edison International and Southern California Edison, we like to call it a “plug-and-play” network, meaning that customers should be able to plug in any device and have it work seamlessly with our power system. Building that network to provide customer choice broadly across our system requires us to modernize the power grid so it can accommodate these new technologies… That is why we are building a more flexible, resilient and low-carbon electricity distribution grid for the 21st century and beyond. Modernizing the grid will not only preserve reliability in the face of increasingly complex distributed energy resources, it will also allow us to utilize these resources to provide grid services.
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