California's aggressive pursuit of renewable energy

August 20, 2014 | By Barbara Vergetis Lundin

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has released a snapshot that shows the state's investor-owned utilities (IOU) are aggressively pursuing renewable energy in order to meet the goals of one of the most ambitious Renewables Portfolio Standards (RPS) in the country. The RPS requires IOUs, electric service providers, and community choice aggregators regulated by the CPUC to procure 33 percent of retail sales per year from eligible renewable sources by 2020.

The CPUC says the state's IOUs have reported that they collectively served 20.9 percent of their retail electric load with RPS-eligible generation from 2011 to 2013. Further, the IOUs have begun accepting project participation requests from customers for their Renewable Market Adjusting Tariff (Re-MAT), which provides a starting feed-in-tariff (FIT) market price for three RPS product categories: baseload, peaking, and non-peaking resources. Participants can subscribe to sell RPS-eligible generation at the given Re-MAT market price, which may increase or decrease for each product type on a bi-monthly basis based on seller subscription levels.

The IOUs are on their way to meeting the Re-MAT capacity targets mainly due to the high subscription levels for the peaking category. The IOUs began accepting Re-MAT applications on October 1, 2013, and began executing power purchase agreements with the applicants on November 1, 2013.

The high subscription levels for the peaking category have led to a significant decline in the peaking category's price for Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) and Southern California Edison's (SCE) Re-MAT programs. However, there has been minimal participation in the non-peaking and baseload categories of the Re-MAT program, which has resulted in no change to the Re-MAT starting price for these categories.

For more:
- see the report

http://www.fierceenergy.com/story/californias-aggressive-pursuit-renewable-energy/2014-08-20