BILL ANALYSIS 1
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SENATE ENERGY, UTILITIES AND COMMUNICATIONS COMMITTEE
ALEX PADILLA, CHAIR
AB 162 - Ruskin Hearing Date:
June 30, 2009 A
As Amended: June 9, 2009 FISCAL B
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DESCRIPTION
Existing law requires entities offering electric services in
California to disclose accurate, reliable, and simple to
understand information on the sources of energy they use to
provide electric services.
Current law requires every California retail seller to disclose
its electricity sources to end-use customers at least quarterly
and to the California Energy Commission (CEC) annually.
This bill would require that every California retail seller
disclose its electricity sources to end-use customers annually.
This bill clarifies how the electricity sources are disclosed to
customers.
BACKGROUND
As a part of the 1996 electric industry restructuring, retail
electricity suppliers are required to disclose information about
the energy resources used to generate the electricity they sell.
The purpose was to provide customers with specific information
that details the generation sources used by energy service
providers compared to an average of other providers' generation
sources.
In recent years publicly owned utilities (POUs) have seen an
increase in reporting requirements. Some of the programs that
require reporting are: the Renewables Portfolio Standard (SB 107,
Simitian), Chapter 464, Statues of 2006, The California Solar
Initiative (SB 1, Murray), Chapter 132, Statues of 2006, and the
Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32, Nunez), Chapter 488, Statues
of 2006. The Northern California Power Agency has found the
reporting to be unnecessarily complicated, time-consuming, and
costly.
COMMENTS
1. Purpose of bill - The purpose of the bill is to streamline
the reporting process. It does this for the POUs and
investor owned utilities by making a quarterly report into an
annual report. It does this for the CEC by deleting
unnecessary reports.
2. Net System Power - One of the reports which this bill
eliminates is the Net System Power (NSP) report. NSP
represents the mix of generation resources not included in
the utility disclosure filings, and are used to serve
California load. When the NSP report requirement was
established the expectation was that most of the electricity
purchases would come from the Power Exchange, where it was
difficult to track specific sources of power. The NSP report
was intended to fill in that information gap. But the Power
Exchange went bankrupt during the 2000 energy crisis. Power
purchases have increasingly been made on a bilateral basis,
making it far easier to track the source of power. The
amount of NSP has dropped by more than 60% since 1998 making
the NSP report less useful. Moreover, the CEC, which
performs the NSP calculation, believes the NSP report does
not provide an accurate picture of power sources.<1>
This bill replaces the term NSP with "Unspecified sources of
power" which is defined as electricity that is not traceable
to a specific generation source. The unspecified source of
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<1> 2007 Net System Power Report (Staff Report), April 2008
CEC-200-2008-002. "Currently energy service providers disclose
most of the generation sources serving their customer load,
reporting the remaining net system power is not useful to
consumers because it does not adequately reflect California's
resource mix. Customers do not understand this information and
usually misinterpret the significance of the net system power
estimate, often assuming that the values represent the statewide
power mix, not just the residual amounts of unclaimed supplies.
The net system power estimates cannot be used to monitor the
progress of the California Renewable Portfolio Standard goals or
establish a representative greenhouse gas profile of electricity
imports." (p.1)
power will be listed on the Power Content Label, but a
determination and reporting of the composition of the
unspecified sources of power is no longer required.
3. Technical Amendment - Page 3, line 38 of the bill should
read "unspecified sources of power."
ASSEMBLY VOTES
Assembly Floor (79-0)
Assembly Appropriations Committee (16-0)
Assembly Utilities and Commerce Committee
(14-0)
POSITIONS
Sponsor:
Northern California Power Agency
Support:
American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees,
AFL-CIO
City of Los Angeles
Sempra Energy (if amended)
Southern California Edison
Southern California Power Authority
Union of Concerned Scientists (if amended)
Oppose:
None on file
Melissa Macias
AB 162 Analysis
Hearing Date: June 30, 2009