Southern California Edison (SCE), one of California’s three investor-owned electric utilities (IOUs), is making moves to procure nearly 105MW more solar generation capacity, some on a competitive basis.
Aimed at helping the utility meet clean energy targets and share the benefits of solar among its customers, SCE will award 54.8MW of utility-scale solar through auctions under the Renewable Auction Mechanism (RAM). The scheme was launched by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), in order to encourage competition and accelerate deployment.
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Additionally, SCE is getting closer to meeting a “33% renewables by 2020” pledge, made under CPUC’s Renewables Portfolio Standard (RPS), which is binding for all three IOUs. According to a statement from SCE made before the weekend, the utility already managed to generate 24% of its energy from renewable sources in 2014. Projects awarded under the RAM, SCE’s sixth such round, will be between 3MW and 20MW capacity per installation.
To support another PUC scheme, SCE has also launched a new programme of its own, Green Rate. CPUC ordered the state’s utilities to deploy up to 600MW of renewables under the Green Tariff Shared Renewables (GTSR), including regions of California where the most disadvantaged members of the population live.
Projects reserved for these areas considered most disadvantaged in each utility’s territory, about 20% of the total service area in each instance, should be between 0.5MW and 3MW in capacity. Projects not in those areas can be up to 20MW capacity. SCE wants to deploy 50MW of PV through Green Rate, bringing the total new intended capacity additions announced on Friday up to 104.8MW.
One of the ideas behind Green Rate is that customers who do not have the opportunity to get solar installed on their rooftops can also benefit from solar, SCE said. The overarching GTSR programme calls for the three IOUs to help their customers get 50% to 100% of their energy demand met by solar. Customers who sign up will pay for the difference in rates on their bills, rather than asking all of SCE's customers to share the costs.
Making room for DERs
All three California IOUs recently put out their distributed energy resources plans – proposals to the regulator outlining how each will pursue goals of adding and accommodating more distributed energy resources to their respective networks. This included detailed plans of how each would assess its capabilities to add DERs to the grid and outlined measures for how each would adapt to a more DER-based approach.
The utilities have also been ordered to procure 1.35GW of energy storage between them to aid network flexibility and resilience through Assembly Bill 2514 (AB2514), which is in part responsible for driving California to being one of the leaders in the US, if not the world, for energy storage deployment so far. In late 2014, SCE also awarded 261MW of grid-connected storage projects under a local capacity requirement procurement.
