Massachusetts regulators see a future in which customers are
leaving investor-owned utilities for municipal aggregators and competitive
third-party suppliers, and they aren't sure how to fit mass-market smart meter
deployments into that future.
Last week, the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities
(DPU) issued an order that “declined to preauthorize any
customer-facing investments” — that is, smart meter deployments — in the
long-running grid
modernization plans of investor-owned utilities National Grid,
Eversource and Unitil.
The decision postpones the five-year advanced metering
infrastructure spending plans of Eversource, which had proposed a $138 million
program, Unitil, with a $1.3 million plan, and National
Grid’s proposals ranging from $74 million to $369 million.
DPU’s order did approve the grid-facing portions of each utility’s
plan, such as distribution automation and conservation voltage reduction,
noting the need for hardening and automating the grid to deal with storm
resilience and recovery, as well as the integration of distributed energy such
as rooftop solar PV, electric vehicles and energy storage.
But it found several weaknesses in each utility’s advanced
metering infrastructure (AMI) business case, based on a combination of two
unusual factors prevailing in the state. First, all these utilities have
already deployed simpler
automated meter reading systems, which have already allowed each
utility to achieve the significant meter-reading savings that account for a big
chunk of the AMI business case.
That left Massachusetts utilities to make their case based
on the other big benefit of AMI: tapping their constant stream of data to
enable real-time pricing, time-of-use rates, and other forms of time-varying
rates, as DPU has dubbed them. But these potential benefits are “called into
question by the increasing percentage of customers on competitive supply (including
municipal aggregation),” the DPU wrote.
The problem is that each utility customer that switches to a
non-utility energy provider is no longer part of each utility's list of
prospective time-varying rate (TVR) adopters, even though the utility paid for
the smart meter that made them available.
And while third-party retailers and municipal aggregators
could offer TVRs of their own, “there is currently no consensus” on how that
can be accomplished, the DPU noted.
First, “neither National Grid’s nor Eversource’s existing
billing systems are able to accommodate a large number of TVR customers without
large-scale, multi-year upgrades,” it wrote. “The need to bill customers
separately could create a barrier to participation in dynamic pricing for
competitive supply customers which, in turn, will lower the potential benefits
to be gained from the deployment of advanced metering functionality.”
Second, data-sharing between utilities and third parties is
still an open subject, it stated. National Grid, Unitil and Eversource plan to
make customer usage data available to third parties, including competitive
suppliers, using the Green Button data access protocol. But before that can
happen, utilities and other stakeholders need to “develop a uniform statewide
data access strategy.”
“In sum, there are several issues that affect competitive
suppliers’ interests and ability to offer dynamic pricing products, including
access to customer data, billing limitations, and the uncertainty of customer
willingness to participate in dynamic pricing products,” the DPU wrote. “As
more customers migrate from basic service to competitive supply alternatives
such as municipal aggregation, the Department will need the certainty of
widespread adoption of dynamic pricing products from the competitive market to
maximize the benefits of the deployment of advanced meter functionality.”
DPU made clear that it isn't giving up on smart meters: “We
emphasize that the Department is not moving away from the deployment of
advanced metering functionality and remains convinced that it is an important
tool in meeting our grid modernization objectives.”
Instead, it’s launching a stakeholder process involving
utilities and competitive market participants, “to consider how to remove
barriers to the implementation of dynamic pricing products for all customers.”
As part of this process, it plans to consider “whether an immediate targeted
deployment of advanced metering functionality to certain customer groups will
yield benefits that justify the costs.”
Massachusetts’ competitive supply market share has boomed in
the past few years, from 31 percent in January 2016, to 48 percent in December
2017, the DPU noted. “It is reasonable to assume that this growth in
participation, particularly with respect to municipal aggregation, will
continue in coming years.”
Daniel Finn-Foley, GTM Research analyst, noted an important
caveat in the DPU’s assessment of future growth of non-utility actors. In
March, the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office proposed eliminating the competitive energy supply
market for individual customers, citing research that shows customers who switched
have paid $176.8 million more than they otherwise would have, many of them in
low-income and minority communities.
If this proposal goes through, “this would create a pretty
significant downside on that percentage of switched customers figure,” he said.
Still, the Attorney General’s office has not proposed doing anything to the
state’s municipal aggregation program — and if individual
switching is taken away, these alternatives may grow to take up much of the
slack, he said.
As for the ability of non-utility actors to enable
time-varying rates of one kind or another to derive value from smart meters,
Finn-Foley noted that “retail energy suppliers would likely make the case that
they could use AMI to drive returns to the utilities, even if the utilities
don't have direct influence over an individual customer.”
Some forms of time-of-use rates are massively popular in
other markets, particularly in Texas, where “free nights and weekends” type
deals have seen wide adoption, he said.
“That said, there's a big difference between a retailer
offering a TVR based on their wholesale market hedging strategy and a utility
offering a TVR that most benefits them and their customers,” he noted.
Finding a way to make time-variable rates that serve both
parties' interests, along with the state's broader energy and environmental
goals, is one of the many challenges ahead for the DPU's stakeholder
process.
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