Over the last two weeks, the Senate Energy, Utilities, and Communications and Assembly Utilities and Energy Committees approved several important measures to address growing problems in timely connecting housing and commercial developments to the electrical distribution grid.
Many local governments have been told it will take anywhere from 2-7 years to improve utility distribution systems to provide additional capacity to support normal growth and facilitate economic development. These excessive delays have resulted in lost opportunities for transformative economic development, inhibit local ability to increase desperately needed local housing stocks, frustrate efforts to install electric vehicle charging systems, and will stymie the state’s efforts to decarbonize existing residential and commercial buildings.
In the Senate, the Senate Energy Committee approved Senate Bill 83 (Wiener, D-San Francisco) and Senate Bill 410 (Becker, D-Menlo Park). SB 83 requires electrical utilities to interconnect a development project within eight weeks of that project becoming “interconnection ready.” SB 410 takes a broader approach to improve electrical distribution planning, reduce interconnection delays, and ensure that California residents and businesses can timely access new and increased service for general economic growth, housing production, and meeting the state’s decarbonization goals. Like SB 83, SB 410 charges the Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) with establishing reasonable average and maximum interconnection time periods. RCRC’s letter of support for Senate Bill 83 is available here, and the letter of support for Senate Bill 410 may be found here.
In the Assembly, Assembly Bill 50 (Wood, D-Santa Rosa) establishes clear expectations for how quickly utilities are expected to deliver service to new customers and fulfill requests for increased load from existing customers. Importantly, AB 50 also requires utilities to refine their distribution planning processes to work more collaboratively with local governments and ensure that the projected demand more closely matches the actual demand for service. Finally, AB 50 requires utilities to share information with local governments about where distribution capacity exists or could be easily added to help meet local housing and economic development objectives. RCRC’s letter for support for Assembly Bill 50 is available here.
The final measure, AB 914 (Friedman, D-Glendale) would have exempted from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) the expansion or upgrade of electrical distribution substations and power lines to meet actual or forecasted demand increases. That provision was gutted from the bill in the Assembly Natural Resources Committee, leaving intact only a requirement that the state complete CEQA environmental reviews of electrical infrastructure projects within two years. This exemption was sorely needed to address the state’s need to upgrade electrical distribution systems. While the remaining provisions of AB 914 are supportable, a two-year process for merely preparing environmental documentation is not compatible with the urgency with which the state often needs to react to these pressing problems. The original version of Assembly 914 may be found here.
For more information, please contact RCRC Policy Advocate, John Kennedy.