SB 1312

Bill Subjects

Abstract

Under existing law, the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) has regulatory authority over public utilities, including electrical corporations, as defined. The Public Utilities Act requires the commission to review and adopt a procurement plan for each electrical corporation in accordance with specified elements, incentive mechanisms, and objectives. The act requires that an electrical corporation's proposed procurement plan include certain elements, including a showing that the electrical corporation will first meet its unmet needs through all available energy efficiency and demand reduction resources that are cost effective, reliable, and feasible and, in order to fulfill its unmet resource needs, that the electrical corporation will procure resources from eligible renewable energy resources in an amount sufficient to meet its procurement requirements pursuant to the California Renewables Portfolio Standard Program (RPS program) . This bill would recast these requirements to instead require a showing that the procurement plan creates or maintains a diversified procurement portfolio consisting of both short-term and long-term electricity and electricity-related and demand reduction products pursuant to a specified loading order. The first element of the loading order would require the electrical corporation to first meet its unmet resource needs through all available energy efficiency and demand reduction resources, including energy conservation, peak load reduction, load shifting, and demand response resources, that are cost effective, reliable, and feasible. The 2nd element of the loading order would require the electrical corporation to secondarily meet its unmet resource needs through cost effective, reliable, and feasible procurement of eligible renewable energy resources pursuant to the RPS program and ultraclean and low-emission distributed generation. The bill would recognize that procurement of variable generation eligible renewable energy resources may require the procurement of additional integration resources, including generation from natural gas powerplants that are able to provide regulation and ancillary services. The 3rd element of the loading order would be procurement of other resources.