Eighteen California legislators wrote to the California Public Utilities Commission last week asking them to hold Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison accountable for “repeatedly missing state-mandated timelines to interconnect solar and storage.”
“Each day mired in interconnection is another day where the customer must pay high rates to the utility instead of earning savings from their system,” the legislators said. “Despite this clear record of non-compliance, the CPUC has not chosen to enforce the rules.”
The letter notes that CPUC data, collected over the last five years, shows the utilities “miss some of these timelines as much as 73% of the time,” and points to an August complaint filed with the CPUC by the California Solar & Storage Association.
That complaint alleges that CALSSA “has repeatedly brought this matter to Commission staff to attempt to resolve the matter informally” and “has been discussing [PG&E and SCE]’s failures to meet Rule 21 timelines with Energy Division staff since 2015,” but “no concrete action has been taken to resolve this pattern of violations.”
“We lead on clean energy, but PG&E and SCE have to stop slowing us down,” Assemblymember Dawn Addis, one of the letter’s signatories, said in a release from CALSSA. “Every missed deadline costs families and businesses money and stalls our climate progress. With major federal timelines approaching, the CPUC must enforce the rules and ensure utilities deliver.”
CALSSA’s complaint said that in informal discussions, PG&E and SCE have blamed the interconnection backlog on a “surge in applications” submitted near the end of eligibility for net metering 2.0, but CALSSA argues this surge was “reasonably foreseeable.”
“Most of those applications submitted near the end of NEM2 eligibility have been processed, and yet the evidence shows that the Defendants’ delays are often worse now than during the end of NEM2 eligibility,” CALSSA said.
In response to the letter, PG&E spokesperson Mike Gazda said, “PG&E is a strong advocate for solar energy and has interconnected nearly 950,000 solar customers — more than any other U.S. utility — to support customers who have made the choice to go solar, strengthen California’s energy grid and reduce our state’s carbon footprint. We look forward to addressing these latest claims made by CALSSA through the appropriate regulatory channels.”
CALSSA argued the opposite in its complaint, saying, “PG&E and SCE have consistently failed to meet the timeline requirements ordered by [Rule 21] and have not shown a pattern of substantive improvement towards those requirements.”
The legislators ask the CPUC to hold the utilities “accountable as soon as possible to ensure that California installs as much solar and storage as it can before the end of the tax credit and beyond.”
CPUC and SCE could not immediately be reached for comment.
Editor's note: This story has been updated to add a comment from Pacific Gas & Electric and to remove information about PG&E's new-service connections, which are not the focus of the legislators' letter.
