New Report Highlights the Benefits and Drawbacks of Regionalizing California’s Grid

A controversial plan to expand grid markets throughout the Western U.S. gets a generally positive review in a new report—but with important warnings attached.

 Should California expand its energy markets to incorporate the rest of the Western United States? 

This vital question for California’s energy future has been the subject of vigorous debate for years now. Supporters say it will allow California to access ever-cheaper wind and solar power from across the region, driving down energy costs and boosting jobs and the economy, while pressuring uncompetitive fossil-fuel-fired power plants to shut down. 

California Energy Regulators Delve Into Threats and Opportunities of ‘Customer Choice’

The CPUC explores potential pitfalls and solutions to utilities losing customers to distributed energy providers, community choice aggregators.

Last year, the California Public Utilities Commission launched an effort to grapple with how the rise of distributed energy resources, third-party energy services business models, and community-choice aggregators were fundamentally altering the state’s energy landscape — for good, or potentially, for ill. 

California’s Flood of Green Energy Could Drive a Record 8GW of Curtailment This Spring

Sun, wind and now water are flooding the grid with energy when nobody needs it—and grid operator CAISO has to balance it out.

Last month, the California Independent System Operator quietly announced that it could face a record-breaking need for curtailments -- paying, or forcing, generators to stop pumping electricity into a transmission grid that just doesn’t have the demand for it at the time. 

“With the bountiful hydro conditions expected this year and significant additional solar installations both in the form of central station and on rooftops, we expect to see significant excess energy production this coming spring,” CAISO CEO Stephen Berberich wrote in a memo to the grid operator’s board of directors. “Currently, the forecast is that we could have the need to curtail from 6,000 [megawatts] to 8,000 [megawatts].”