For the first time in New York history, the state Public Service Commission has granted a request that utility companies release aggregate data from certain municipalities about their customers”™ kilowatt usage and the total number of homes and business that are consuming electricity.
Behind the request is Sustainable Westchester Inc., the nonprofit consortium of about 40 dues-paying municipalities in Westchester County that has spearheaded the state”™s pilot community choice aggregation program, which requires the data to move forward with its efforts.
So far, the consortium has received data from the utilities ”” Con Edison and New York State Electric and Gas Corp. ”” for almost all of the program”™s 25 participating villages, towns or cities that passed locals laws to opt-in to community choice aggregation.
Sustainable Westchester anticipates that there will be 135,000 customers in those 25 municipalities who will be automatically enrolled in the program, but they will have the choice to opt out. Each community choose a third-party supplier, known as an energy service company or ESCO that will negotiate lower electricity rates on the customers”™ behalf.
In talks with the utilities, Leo Wiegman, executive director of Sustainable Westchester, and Mike Gordon, who is on the consortium”™s board of directors, said it was important to emphasize that releasing the data was a public good.
Gordon said the utilities”™ concerns have been about individual data, but added that what Sustainable Westchester was interested in was not individual or proprietary.
“What we”™re trying to do with this program is develop a way to understand at the larger level what the total value of a 5 or 10 percent reduction (in energy) on that peak hour during one of the hottest summer days is,” Wiegman said.
By identifying the peak hours of energy consumption and then determining rates based on that information, customers can make money-saving decisions about how they use electricity, like when is the cheapest time to turn on the air conditioning.
The point of community choice aggregation programs, which have been adopted in six states, is to “diagnose the potential of energy efficiency programs,” Gordon said, “and help us quantify the value of that.”
But community choice aggregation is not all about the consumer.
Energy experts have said that the utilities must be part of the equation to help their customers become more efficient in their energy consumption, but also in order to find new ways of making money without having to rely on energy rates that hurt the consumer.
New York”™s utility companies anticipate requiring $30 billion to maintain its assets and capabilities in the next 10 years, compared with the $17 billion required for the previous 10 years.
At a recent conference sponsored by the Solar Energy Industries Association and Solar Electric Power Association that took place in White Plains, some panelists discussed how utilities should and could be looking to identify new revenue models.
Janet Gail Besser, vice president of policy and government affairs for the New England Clean Energy Council, posed the question: “Are there other sources of revenue to some of the earnings mechanisms that are talked about in the Track 2 order?”
Besser is referring to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo”™s Reforming the Energy Vision plan, which is the strategy that was developed to meet the state”™s sustainability goals. Track 2 is the second round of goals that largely focus on reforming utilities”™ ratemaking practices.
Richard Kauffman, chairman of energy and finance for the state, said in a statement that “innovative programs like Sustainable Westchester are part of Reforming the Energy Vision to give customers greater value, more choices and help New York achieve its goal of 50 percent renewable energy 2030.”
The Track 2 report, which was released in February 2015, said, “Rather than simply building infrastructure, utilities could find earning opportunities in enhanced performance and in transactional revenues.”
One of those transactional revenues, Besser said, could be data transactions.
Sustainable Westchester arranged to pay about 7 cents for each customer”™s data that they received from the utility, which is estimated to amount to about $11,000 total and will come out of the consortium”™s budget.
One point of the Reforming the Energy Vision, Gordon said, is to have the utilities “look at the market differently and one of the things that we have identified is there may be an opportunity for the utilities to earn literally millions more dollars than they are currently earning.”
Gordon”™s use of millions is not hyperbole. Sustainable Westchester is in ongoing negotiations with the utility companies about other energy efficiency options ”” which Gordon did not specifically address because they are still negotiating the proposals ”” that could earn Con Edison and New York State Electric and Gas Corp. roughly $2.5 million through the county”™s community choice aggregation program.
