The California Photo voltaic & Storage Affiliation (CALSSA) submitted a formal complaint on August 28 to the California Public Utilities Fee concerning customer support that’s far under established requirements on the state’s largest two utilities. The criticism asks for a tremendous of $10 million towards Pacific Fuel & Electrical and Southern California Edison.
Clients searching for to put in photo voltaic panels and batteries should request utility approval to put in the tools. Utilities assessment interconnection purposes and ensure transformers and different elements of the electrical grid are sufficiently big to deal with any vitality the shoppers ship to the utilities. The state mandates that utilities carry out varied steps in that assessment course of inside specified timelines.
PG&E and SCE routinely ignore these timelines and trigger in depth delays for photo voltaic installations. This raises prices for shoppers as they stability financing and building prices and can’t scale back their vitality purchases from the utilities till they get utility permission to make use of their tools.
“There are clear guidelines on how lengthy the utilities can take for his or her assessment, however there was zero enforcement of these guidelines,” mentioned Kevin Luo, coverage and market improvement supervisor for CALSSA. “PG&E and SCE get away with suppressing what they contemplate to be their competitors.”
The California Public Utilities Fee established a typical in 2020 that utilities meet the established timelines for 95% of tasks and ordered the utilities to submit quarterly experiences on their efficiency. These experiences present that three steps of the assessment course of have compliance charges as little as 27 to 45%, and timelines for 3 different steps are met solely 53 to 81% of the time. These charges haven’t improved over time for the reason that 2020 order.
“It’s clear that if PG&E and SCE are usually not held accountable, they’ll proceed to flagrantly ignore necessities which might be supposed to make them present cheap customer support,” added Luo.
CALSSA expects an administrative regulation decide on the state fee to assessment the criticism within the coming months and decide whether or not fines are warranted.
Information merchandise from the California Photo voltaic & Storage Affiliation
