Why Utilities In Minnesota & Other States Need To Plan For More Competition

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

This article was originally published on ILSR.org.

Utility Distributed Energy Forecasts

A report by John Farrell, released July 2020.

Utility regulators must exercise vigilance to ensure that utility-scale and utility-owned investments don’t crowd out distributed energy solutions just because they do not provide profits to the monopoly utility’s shareholders.

Executive Summary

Click to read the full report

Many US utilities develop comprehensive resource plans every few years, often required by state law or state regulatory commissions. Especially in states where utilities have monopoly service territories, these plans set expectations for electricity use and the grid infrastructure required to meet it. However, these plans often drastically underestimate the contribution of electric customers and non-utility developers to the electricity system’s resources – specifically the contribution of distributed solar. Utility regulators often defer to the utility and blindly accept utility forecasts, despite significant evidence that the forecasts are faulty, to the financial and economic harm of electric customers.

Undercounting distributed solar has significant financial and economic consequences. As shown in the Smarter Grid and other studies of the value of distributed energy resources, distributed solar can provide cost-competitive carbon-free electricity and significant economic and wealth-building benefits to a broad array of electric customers.

This report explores the phenomenon of undercounting customer-sited and non-utility solar energy in Minnesota: a state with several adopted policies expressing a public interest in distributed generation. It explores this phenomenon with a utility that has a strong reputation for pursuing low-carbon resources that it controls, Xcel Energy. The report finds that Xcel Energy’s forecasts for distributed solar, including customer-sited and community solar, are significantly low in light of existing trends and comparative models. Accordingly, as in all states with monopoly regulated businesses, utility regulators must exercise vigilance to ensure that utility-scale and utility-owned investments don’t crowd out distributed energy solutions just because they do not provide profits to the monopoly utility’s shareholders.

Underwhelming Solar Forecasts

  • ILSR compared Xcel Energy’s rooftop solar forecasts to two independent models and found that rooftop solar growth is likely to be double, or more, to what the utility anticipates.
  • ILSR compared Xcel Energy’s community solar forecasts to the existing queue, recent growth trends, and system constraints and found that – barring legislative action to curtail it – community solar is likely to far outstrip the utility’s projections.
  • ILSR noted the lack of any forecast for wholesale distributed generation, despite several state-sponsored studies showing its economic superiority to transmission-connected resources. We also found that Minnesota’s lack of compliance with federal competition law seriously undercuts the opportunity for this market to develop.
  • Xcel Energy’s forecasts for distributed solar, including customer-sited and community solar, are significantly low in light of existing trends and comparative models.

This article originally posted at ilsr.org. For timely updates, follow John Farrell on Twitter, our energy work on Facebook, or sign up to get the Energy Democracy weekly update.


Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.

Latest CleanTechnica TV Video


Advertisement
 
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.

John Farrell

John directs the Democratic Energy program at ILSR and he focuses on energy policy developments that best expand the benefits of local ownership and dispersed generation of renewable energy. His seminal paper, Democratizing the Electricity System, describes how to blast the roadblocks to distributed renewable energy generation, and how such small-scale renewable energy projects are the key to the biggest strides in renewable energy development.   Farrell also authored the landmark report Energy Self-Reliant States, which serves as the definitive energy atlas for the United States, detailing the state-by-state renewable electricity generation potential. Farrell regularly provides discussion and analysis of distributed renewable energy policy on his blog, Energy Self-Reliant States (energyselfreliantstates.org), and articles are regularly syndicated on Grist and Renewable Energy World.   John Farrell can also be found on Twitter @johnffarrell, or at jfarrell@ilsr.org.

John Farrell has 518 posts and counting. See all posts by John Farrell