BILL ANALYSIS �
AB 66
Page 1
ASSEMBLY THIRD READING
AB 66 (Muratsuchi)
As Amended May 8, 2013
Majority vote
UTILITIES & COMMERCE 14-1 APPROPRIATIONS
17-0
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|Ayes:|Bradford, Patterson, |Ayes:|Gatto, Harkey, Bigelow, |
| |Bonilla, Buchanan, Fong, | |Bocanegra, Bradford, Ian |
| |Beth Gaines, Garcia, | |Calderon, Campos, |
| |Gorell, Roger Hern�ndez, | |Donnelly, Eggman, Gomez, |
| |Jones, Quirk, Rendon, | |Hall, Ammiano, Linder, |
| |Skinner, Williams | |Pan, Quirk, Wagner, Weber |
| | | | |
|-----+--------------------------+-----+--------------------------|
|Nays:|Ch�vez | | |
| | | | |
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SUMMARY : Requires the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC)
to require an electrical corporation report on frequency and
duration of electrical service interruptions. Specifically, this
bill :
1)Requires PUC to require an electrical corporation to include in an
annual reliability report, information on system reliability
including the frequency and duration of interruptions in services
ranked by areas with both the most frequent and longest outages.
2)Requires PUC to use the information to require remediation of
reliability deficiencies if the report, or more than one report,
identifies repeated deficiencies in the same region.
FISCAL EFFECT : According to the Assembly Appropriations Committee:
1)Minor, one-time costs to PUC in the $25,000 range.
2)Ongoing costs in the $65,000 range to oversee remediation efforts.
COMMENTS :
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1)Author's Statement . "For too long, cities, businesses, and
residents along the Palos Verdes Peninsula - and across California
- have suffered from frequent and at times lengthy power outages.
These outages led to hundreds of acres being burned, food being
spoiled, and residents being left without recourse. AB 66 allows
consumers to see quarterly outage reports from their electrical
corporations, while providing the California Public Utilities
Commission and Californians with readily accessible information
that can be utilized for better infrastructure planning.
Transparency has been shown to be good for business and for
consumer relations. AB 66 provides Californians with information
they have a right to know, and provides a mechanism for
accountability for rate payers."
2)Current Reliability Reporting Requirements . Through PUC Decision
D9609045 and subsequent decisions, PUC adopted incident reporting
rules to ensure that the PUC is able to monitor incidents that
affect utility operations or facilities. The annual reports are
published on PUC Web site and provide information on:
a) The top 10 power outage events based on customer-minutes,
excluding events such as weather, declared emergencies, or
disasters affecting over 10% of the utility's customers; and
b) Circuits in which customers have experienced greater than 12
sustained outages in a reporting year.
This information does not provide local reliability information in
a format that is conducive to understanding whether a locale is
experiencing higher than normal outages.
While these reliability reports are useful, information on the
frequency and location of outages would help to give clarity and
meaning to the incidents described in the statistical analyses.
PUC Decision D9609045 does require circuit-level reliability
information to be made available in response to a request by an
interested party. This decision states that: "Reliability indices
using a portion of the system (circuit, division, region, or
district), or smaller time periods (no smaller than a month),
should be recorded and provided to any interested person upon
request. In a footnote, the Decision states: Utilities should
AB 66
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record information at whichever of these levels (circuit,
district, division, or region) their then current information
collecting capacities exist at."
1)Current local outage information . Currently, Pacific Gas and
Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas and
Electric provide real-time information on their Web sites showing
locations and number of customers affected by outages. This
information shows the start time of the outage, the estimated
restoration time, the number of customers impacted, and the cause
(if available).
It should be noted that the electrical system is not deployed
consistent with political boundaries of cities and counties. In
addition, for security reasons, it may be necessary and
appropriate to be less specific and instead generally indicate the
regions when ranking frequency and location of regions with
reliability problems. PUC could solicit input from the electrical
corporations on including regional information in the annual
reliability reports and ensure that the data present regional
reliability information aggregated to the level necessary to
protect system security.
2)Is this information available now ? PUC Decision D9609045 requires
that the electrical corporations "record and maintain reliability
information specified in and provide it to any interested person
within 30 days of a request." The Decision goes states
"Reliability indices using a portion of the system (circuit,
division, region, or district), or smaller time periods (no
smaller than a month), should be recorded and provided to any
interested person upon request."
However, the information "for consumers" on PUC's Web site does
not provide consumers with information on what they can do if they
are experiencing frequent service interruptions, so it is unclear
how a customer who is troubled by frequent service interruptions
might be able to find out if their problem is a widespread issue.
All of the utilities Web site currently provide customer service
contacts to help individual customers with outages but the
utilities do not publish information on regional service
reliability statistics. Customers are not informed that they can
request region-specific outages information from their utility.
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Analysis Prepared by : Susan Kateley / U. & C. / (916) 319-2083
FN: 0000923