| |  | | Below is an excerpt from the latest State Bulletin column. Join GTM Squared to access this full article as well as the deep Squared archives! | By Julia Pyper
On June 10, stakeholders submitted reply comments in a New York Reforming the Energy Vision docket on valuing distributed energy resources. The DER docket is one of the most comprehensive reviews of net energy metering (NEM) to date, with input from a wide range of interest groups on alternatives to the existing retail-rate NEM structure.
Parties submitted proposals and recommendations on how to value DER in mid-April. We detailed some of the most prominent proposals in earlier sections of this series. Part 1 looked at a landmark agreement between six utilities and three major solar players dubbed the Solar Progress Partnership. Part 2 looked at proposals from Solar Electric Industries Association and Vote Solar; the Environmental Defense Fund; and the Advanced Energy Economy Institute in partnership with the Alliance for Clean Energy New York and the Northeast Clean Energy Council.
The New York Public Service Commission has established a formula for valuing DER in the longer term that is expressed as LMP+D -- where “LMP” represents the location-based marginal price of energy and “D” represents the value provided to the electric distribution system. The formula is intended to assign value to DERs based on all of the benefits they provide. But while the general structure has already been determined, there is more debate to come around how to value each of the formula inputs. Recognizing the broader discussions that lie ahead, regulators set a deadline to implement an interim alternative to retail-rate NEM by 2017.
| | | The notion of replacing retail-rate NEM with another type of compensation mechanism is a contentious issue. Most proposals, including the Solar Progress Partnership proposal, have advocated for keeping some form of net metering for rooftop solar projects in place in the near term. But stakeholders disagreed on how the interim NEM rate should be structured and for how long the NEM mechanism should be kept in place.
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