BILL ANALYSIS Ó
AB 66
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CONCURRENCE IN SENATE AMENDMENTS
AB 66 (Muratsuchi)
As Amended September 3, 2013
Majority vote
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|ASSEMBLY: |75-1 |(May 28, 2013) |SENATE: |39-0 |(September 9, |
| | | | | |2013) |
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Original Committee Reference: U. & C.
SUMMARY : Requires the California Public Utilities Commission
(PUC) to require an electrical corporation to include
information on geographical information on the frequency and
duration of electrical service interruptions in their annual
reliability reports. Specifically, this bill :
1)Requires PUC to determine the geographical boundaries to be
used in the reports.
2)Requires the electrical corporations to publish the reports on
their Internet Web sites.
3)Requires the PUC to order the electrical corporation to
implement cost-effective remediation as specified unless the
PUC determines the remediation is not justified or reasonable.
The Senate amendments are technical in nature and the bill is
substantially similar to the version passed by the Assembly.
FISCAL EFFECT : According to the Senate Appropriations
Committee:
1)One-time costs of $325,000 from the Public Utilities
Reimbursement Account (special) to modify reporting
requirements and to develop the procedures for determining
required remediation based on the annual reliability report.
2)Ongoing costs of $100,000 from the Public Utilities
Reimbursement Account for increased review of annual
reliability reports, making remediation determinations, and to
oversee required remediation.
COMMENTS :
AB 66
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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. 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."
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.
The electrical system is not deployed consistent with
political boundaries of cities and counties so it is difficult
to compare whether one community is experiencing higher levels
of outages than another city.
3)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 on to state "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.
All of the utilities Web sites 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.
Analysis Prepared by : Susan Kateley / U. & C. / (916)
319-2083
AB 66
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FN: 0002308