February 2014

Democratic legislators in Wisconsin plan to unveil a plan this week that would require investor-owned utilities, municipal utilities, and rural electric cooperatives (“electric providers”) to increase their renewable electricity portfolios to 30% by 2030. Wisconsin’s current renewable portfolio mandates that electric providers obtain 10% of their retails sales from electricity generated from renewable resources by

My colleague, Daniel Lee, followed oral argument yesterday in the U.S. Supreme Court’s consideration of federal greenhouse gas (GHG) regulation in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, and provides this analysis:

During oral argument for Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA this Monday, the Supreme Court conflicted over a number of issues including the application of

After a full day of hearing arguments on Xcel’s proposed Community Solar Garden (CSG) program (see more on that here), the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission deliberated in public on the issue yesterday and made some important modifications to Xcel’s proposal. The program would allow Xcel customers to invest in off-site solar facilities and receive

Qualifying facility interconnection conversions can be an effective way to bypass the interconnection queue, even during a repower. But there are groundrules to a conversion, and today FERC applied those rules and determined that qualifying facility owners may not be entitled to as much converted capacity as they might think.
Continue Reading Qualifying Facility Conversions – It’s What All the Kids Are Talking About

Final comments were filed yesterday on the proposed methodology for calculating a value of solar (VOS) rate for utilities in Minnesota (more on the proposed methodology is here). With the Commission required to make a decision within 60 days of January 31, 2014, parties remain in fairly wide disagreement about what is required by statute, particularly what values are truly “known and measurable” and whether the value calculation or proposition applies to the particular utility or more broadly to society. Depending on the interpretation of these factors among others, the estimated  VOS rate could vary from half of that suggested by the Department’s original $0.135/kWh example to something considerably higher. The rate would eventually apply to Xcel’s Community Solar Garden (CSG) Program and potentially as an alternative to net-metering arrangements for projects under 1MW. In a separate proceeding yesterday, the Commission set interim rates for the CSG program that could be even higher with a placeholder SREC value included (more on that in a separate blog).
Continue Reading Viewpoints Diverge on the Value of Solar in Minnesota

 For those companies owning generation on the Bonneville Power Administration system, mark your calendars for March 15, 2014.  That’s the day by which you must submit your facility displacement costs for Bonneville’s implementation of its Oversupply Management Protocol (aka Environmental Redispatch) that provides compensation for certain generator curtailments.  The failure to submit facility displacement costs

Ralls Corp., a privately-held company owned by executives of the China-based heavy machinery manufacturing conglomerate Sany Group, recently filed an appeal in its ongoing effort to avoid President Obama’s order requiring the company to divest itself of its interest in four wind farms in Oregon. We have previously reported on the order, which was issued