‘No response from CUC on 2015 CPUC request’

No filings have been made by the Commonwealth Utilities Corp. regarding the recommendations made by the consultants of the Commonwealth Public Utilities Commission on the corporation’s net metering program protocols.

In a report before the CPUC and CUC hearing held last week, CPUC consultant Georgetown Consulting Group, Inc. said that nothing has been filed so far on the recommendations made in 2015.

“We determined that billing protocols contained in [4 CMC] §8536 and §8537 were being correctly applied with respect to net metering, however, we determined that the process by which that is being done has not been memorialized by CUC. It was being done in an ad-hoc basis,” Georgetown’s Larry Gawlik said.

Georgetown recommended that CUC memorialize and provide to the commission descriptions of the CUC net-metering billing and annual reconciliation methodologies employed per sections 8537 and 8539(e); certification that it has adopted and fully implemented the net-metering billing and reconciliation methodology; provide the commission with the date it completed the first annual reconciliation cycle and that it should be satisfactory to the commission; certification that it will conduct “annual” reconciliations thereafter as required by sections 8537 and 8539(e); and that a process has been initiated for providing consumption and production information per section 8540.

Georgetown also recommended that CUC should update the commission on the conclusions from the review that the corporation has indicated it is doing on the need for regulations per §4(a) of P.L. 18-75, which prioritizes net metering interconnection for health and education renewable energy capacity.

“This information was provided to the commission in 2015. The commission has requested that CUC provide its response. At this point in time, to my knowledge, there has been nothing filed with the Commission on those particular requests,” Gawlik said.

CUC currently has 100 net meter customers for commercial and residential and has 35 pending applications.

CUC said that contributions made by net metering customers vary but it has a total demand of 2.3 megawatts approximately.

CUC did not make any comments on the report presented by Georgetown.

“For the record, CUC was given a May 2nd deadline to respond to Georgetown’s recommendations if it had any concerns and I assume that, since there was no filing, CUC is comfortable with the recommendations Georgetown has made,” hearing officer Harry Boertzel said.