The California Supreme Court on Wednesday declined to review a challenge of the state’s greenhouse gas cap-and-trade program, preserving the 2006 law that requires power plants and other polluters to reduce carbon emissions or purchase state-issued credits.
The court declined to review the California Chamber of Commerce’s appeal of an April 6 decision by the Third District Court of Appeal favoring of the program.
NRG’s Etiwanda natural gas plant, Ranch Cucamonga
While the business interests represented by the chamber did not oppose the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, which set the emissions limits, they attacked the associated California Air Resources Board (CARB) regulations that created the cap-and-trade program allowing the sale of some greenhouse gas emissions allowances.
The legislation required covered entities such as power plants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and designated CARB to monitor and regulate emissions sources.
Under the program, large emitters of greenhouse gases must purchase emissions credits at CARB’s quarterly auctions to cover emissions not accounted for with free credits. The plaintiffs said the auction sales exceeded the State Legislature’s delegation of authority to the board, and that the revenue generated amounts to a tax.
The appeals court in its earlier ruling said “the legislature gave broad discretion to the board to design a distribution system, and a system including the auction of some allowances did not exceed the scope of legislative delegation.” The court said the legislature later ratified the system by specifying how to use the proceeds.
The appeals court also said the revenue is not a tax because it is a voluntary decision driven by business judgments regarding whether it is better to buy credits than reduce emissions, which, unlike a tax, has value.
“Reducing air emissions reduces pollution, and no entity has a right to pollute,” the lower court said.
The chamber did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the high court’s decision.
The Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council intervened in the proceeding on behalf of CARB.
“This is the final step in this case to affirm California’s innovative climate program, including its carbon auctions, which serves as a vital safeguard to ensure polluters are held accountable for their pollution,” EDF senior attorney Erica Morehouse said in a statement.
Even with the court challenge behind it, cap-and-trade still faces an uncertain future. Gov. Jerry Brown is trying to extend the life of the program, which expires in 2020, through a ballot measure.
The California Supreme Court (photographed above) upheld a lower court ruling
“With this Supreme Court victory, now it’s up to us to take action extending California’s cap-and-trade system on a more permanent basis,” Brown said in a statement.
CARB is expected to auction about half of the program’s total allowances by 2020. As of January 2015, about 500 million allowances had been given away and about 75 million were auctioned.
President Trump announced six “initiatives” in a speech at Energy Department headquarters Thursday, saying they would create “American energy dominance” in the world.
Trump (left) and Perry
The announcements were part of the White House’s Energy Week, an effort to highlight the administration’s energy policies.
Some of the announcements were merely approvals by the departments of Energy, Interior and State. Flanked by Vice President Mike Pence, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, Trump announced:
A review of U.S. policies on nuclear energy resources;
The Treasury Department would work to address barriers on financing foreign coal plants;
A Presidential Permit for a petroleum pipeline crossing Mexico;
Sempra Energy had agreed to negotiate a deal to export LNG to South Korea;
Approval of two long-term applications by the Energy Department to export LNG from the Lake Charles, La., facility; and
Trump did not go into specifics about the announcements. They made up a brief segment of a speech punctuated by praise for his administration’s elimination of “job-killing” regulations, celebration of the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change and jabs at CNN for recent resignations over a retracted story about alleged ties between a Trump ally and a Russian investment fund.
Left to right: Pence, Trump and Perry
Like his speech announcing the withdrawal from Paris, Trump’s remarks had nationalistic overtones, arguing that the U.S. has been taken advantage of by other countries that “used energy as an economic weapon.” The president did briefly mention that America’s “clean, beautiful coal” was in high demand from countries such as Ukraine. And he said the pipeline to Mexico would go “right under” his proposed border wall.
Nuclear Energy Institute CEO Maria Korsnick, who attended the speech, thanked the president for the study on the challenges facing the nuclear energy industry.
“If the president wishes for our nation to achieve nuclear energy dominance both at home and abroad, he’ll do it by preserving the existing nuclear fleet, paving the way for the deployment of advanced nuclear designs and stimulating exports abroad,” she said in a statement.
Left to right: Zinke, Pence, Trump, Perry and Pruitt
Tom Kiernan, CEO of the American Wind Energy Association, issued a statement Thursday expressing support for Trump’s “strategic vision to seek American energy dominance.”
“The administration’s all-of-the-above energy strategy, including resources like wind, can work to make America safer and more self-reliant while growing the economy,” Kiernan said.
Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said Trump’s “Energy Week” showed “just how weak he is on energy solutions. Trump’s rhetoric on energy falls short of the reality in which he’s canceling life-saving public health standards that protect clean air and water just to boost the profits of fossil fuel executives. Trump isn’t leading America, he’s trying to drive us backwards and he will not succeed.
“Trump’s head is stuck so far into the sand that it’s no wonder the only thing he can speak of is fossil fuels — he can’t see that solar and wind energy are creating more jobs and powering homes and businesses across the country. If he truly cared about energy dominance, Trump would be investing in growing the booming clean energy economy rather than trying to turn back the clock for dirty fuels.”
Eversource Energy and National Grid notified FERC on Thursday that they are suspending the permitting process for the $3 billion Access Northeast natural gas pipeline expansion project in New England until they can find a way to finance it. The two utilities made the filing (PF16-1) together with pipeline operator Enbridge, according to a report in the Boston Globe.
The story quoted Brian McKerlie, a vice president at Enbridge, as saying that after the companies persuade state legislators to allow a special tariff for electric ratepayers to fund the project, “we’ll be able to re-engage the FERC filing process and be back on track.”
| Spectra Energy
The companies’ action was not unexpected.
Last August, Eversource and National Grid withdrew requests to bill customers of their four electric distribution companies for natural gas capacity from the proposed pipeline expansion after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court vacated an order by the state regulators approving pipeline capacity contracts. (See Eversource, National Grid Withdraw Requests to Bill for Pipeline.)
The increasing reliance on natural gas to generate electricity in New England has led to reliability concerns, while the source of much of the gas, fracking in Pennsylvania, has led to environmental protests over new pipelines or plans to expand existing ones.
On Tuesday, Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate Setti Warren (D) visited a gas compressor station in Weymouth that serves the Algonquin and would serve its expanded version. Warren, mayor of Newton, criticized the pipeline expansion as a “mistake for Massachusetts” and said Gov. Charlie Baker (R) should oppose it.
Tesla and other energy storage companies have urged CAISO to accelerate development of a new demand response product that is based on excess generation, but the grid operator says it must first address many concerns before including the product in any proposal.
The electric automaker and other storage proponents last week submitted comments on a draft proposal of CAISO’s Energy Storage and Distributed Energy (ESDER) Phase 2 initiative, which is unlikely to include establishment of a new proxy demand resource (PDR) that would consume load based on an ISO dispatch instruction, including providing regulation service.
| CAISO
CAISO wants to omit the load consumption product from the ESDER Phase 2 package to be presented to its Board of Governors for approval during its July meeting. (See CAISO Finalizes Rules for DR, Distributed Generation.) The ISO plans to defer the product until a third phase in order to better understand the limits of non-generator resources and other issues identified in its separate “multiple-use applications” initiative related to storage.
Increasing instances of generation oversupply and solar curtailments is creating urgency for a market mechanism that facilitates consumption of surplus power, and stakeholders have generally agreed that CAISO should not let jurisdictional rate issues interfere with development of the bidirectional PDR product capable of both consuming and producing energy.
“CAISO staff has indicated that owing to the retail billing implications of customer participation in a hypothetical load consumption product, such a product is too fraught to consider developing and implementing until such implications are addressed,” Tesla said in its comments. The company “strongly disagrees with this perspective,” provided that customers understand that their retail bills will be impacted by a decision to charge a storage device based on the billing determinants they are subject to pursuant to their retail tariff.
Tesla said that customers of the program should be able to determine for themselves whether to provide load consumption based on the difference between retail rates and wholesale pricing. Customers would find value in offsetting their retail bills through negative wholesale prices while helping California mitigate oversupply, the company contended.
While storage advocates are urging CAISO to develop a bidirectional PDR product, “a broad cross-section of stakeholders” said it should “take more time to resolve issues, consider options and coordinate with” the California Public Utilities Commission, CAISO said.
Among these concerns are the effects on retail rates, customer interest, demand charges and technical implementation issues.
Pacific Gas and Electric’s “excess supply pilot has delved into these issues and has reported that participants are concerned about rate impacts and ratcheting demand charges,” CAISO said in its revised proposal.
“Contrary to comments from the storage community, the CAISO does not view these barriers as jurisdictional in nature, but as real impediments to customer interest and robust customer participation in a bidirectional PDR product,” the ISO said.
Energy storage companies said CAISO should also work on enabling behind-the-meter storage to participate in the wholesale market via the PDR product. There is unused potential in BTM energy storage because to do so currently requires participation as a non-generator resource, said Tesla, energy storage company Stem and EV charger manufacturer eMotorWerks.
Tesla Distributed Battery Storage Power Plant | Tesla
There has also been discussion within the Load Consumption Working Group, which Tesla said CAISO staff “appears to defer to stakeholders to revive and manage.” Storage companies want the ISO to take a leadership role in the working group.
The California Energy Storage Association (CESA), which represents more than 60 companies, said it “supports rapid action” on the group performing further work and having CAISO lead it, adding that the ISO should ensure ESDER promotes nondiscriminatory access to markets.
“CAISO should focus on how to ensure resources like PDRs can show up in CAISO markets to compete to provide services,” CESA said.
A MISO plan to share generators’ hourly gas-burn estimates with select natural gas pipeline operators will require more explanation before getting federal approval, FERC staff said Tuesday.
Agency staff issued the RTO a deficiency letter in response to a proposal to share nonpublic, day-ahead gas-usage profiles with pipeline companies — which currently include Northern Natural Gas, ANR Pipeline and DTE Energy — before this winter as part of a pilot program meant to improve gas reliability (ER17-1556). (See “3 Pipeline Companies to Receive Gas Profiles Before Winter,” MISO Reliability Subcommittee Briefs.)
In filing the proposal, MISO stressed that it would share only aggregated data, while also contending that sharing nonpublic operational data was allowed under FERC Order 787. The RTO plans to execute nondisclosure agreements with relevant pipelines and utilities under the proposal.
But FERC staff were primarily concerned with a provision that would also allow MISO to share data with local distribution companies (LDCs) and intrastate pipelines in addition to interstate operators.
While the deficiency letter acknowledged that Order 787 recognized the “significant” role of LDCs and others in maintaining reliability of both interstate pipeline systems and electric transmission systems, it also noted the order “declined to provide blanket authorization for the disclosure of nonpublic, operational information” to LDCs, intrastate pipelines or gas gatherers, instead requiring a case-by-case approach. FERC staff determined that “MISO does not provide support for this aspect of its proposal” and gave the RTO 30 days to provide more supporting information to justify sharing nonpublic information with LDCs.
Agency staff also said that MISO’s proposal failed to expressly prohibit the use of nonpublic, operational information “to the detriment of any natural gas and/or electric market,” as an earlier, similar proposal from PJM promised. MISO’s proposed nondisclosure agreement merely prohibits the “receiving entity from illegal and non-legitimate use of the nonpublic, operational information,” FERC staff said, asking MISO to explain the omission.
Some MISO stakeholders earlier this year voiced opposition to the pilot program, saying it could affect reliability if participating gas operators make burn rate decisions relying solely on partial day-ahead data. (See MISO Stakeholders Question Electric-Gas Info Sharing.)
ITC Holdings on Tuesday offered a rare look into its Michigan control room as part of a company update that included an appeal for increased investment in transmission.
ITC Control Room
Blair
During the online “virtual tour” and accompanying web seminar, CEO Linda Blair called for a sense of “urgency” for the industry to develop new electric infrastructure.
“Now is a critical time to support investment for the years ahead,” Blair said, adding that “no meaningful interregional planning process” exists to address extra demands being placed on the grid, particularly from the growth of wind generation.
“We have to have a requirement that transmission lines have a way to come to fruition. … I think it requires action from FERC,” she said.
ITC was acquired by Canadian utility Fortis last October. Immediately following the $11.3 billion sale, Blair took over as president and CEO of the Michigan-based company.
Blair said ITC has not changed its company vision since the acquisition. “We’re a transmission-only company. We breathe, sleep and eat transmission. That’s what we do, and we do it well,” she said.
Jipping said ITC is awaiting approval by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the Lake Erie Connector project, a 1,000-MW, bidirectional, underwater HVDC transmission line that will ship electricity between Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator and PJM territory in Erie, Pa. He expects the company to wrap up the permitting process for the $1 billion project in late summer.
ITC executives also touted the reliability of the current ITC system that spans Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois, Missouri and Oklahoma.
Slocum
Vice President of Operations Brian Slocum said ITC’s system remained operational during Michigan’s historic March 8 wind storm and weather-related outages that affected more than 1 million people.
“Over the years, we’ve seen less unplanned outages on this wall,” Slocum said from a virtual ITC control room. But more needs to be done to improve the country’s transmission grid, which was not designed to handle so many renewable sources of generation, he said.
“Fortunately, there’s a dialogue underway” on infrastructure improvements in this country, Slocum added.
The White House late Wednesday announced that President Trump intends to nominate Richard Glick, general counsel for the Democrats on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, to replace outgoing FERC Commissioner Colette Honorable.
Glick | Avangrid Renewables
Glick has been with the committee since February 2016. Prior to that, he was a lobbyist at Avangrid Renewables, PPM Energy and PacifiCorp. Glick also served under the Clinton administration as an adviser to Energy Secretary Bill Richardson. He earned his bachelor’s from George Washington University and his J.D. from Georgetown University.
Glick’s term would end in 2022. The announcement came two days before Honorable’s term at the commission ends, leaving acting Chair Cheryl LaFleur, a Democrat, as the only commissioner. (See FERC’s Colette Honorable Says Goodbye.)
Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner Robert Powelson and Neil Chatterjee, energy adviser to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), have already advanced out of committee and are awaiting confirmation votes by the full Senate.
Powelson and Chatterjee, both Republicans, would restore the commission’s quorum, but it is unknown when McConnell intends to schedule the votes: The Senate has been consumed by Republicans’ efforts to replace Obamacare, and reports say that Democrats have refused to consent to votes on other items while debate on the bill is ongoing.
The confirmation of the three nominees would leave only the seat vacated in February by former Chair Norman Bay, a term that would end next year.
FERC’s membership will see a nearly complete turnover if Republicans Robert Powelson and Neil Chatterjee and Democrat Richard Glick are confirmed by the Senate to join acting Chair Cheryl LaFleur. President Trump has not yet nominated a third Republican.
Numerous reports have identified Kevin McIntyre, co-head of the energy practice at law firm Jones Day, as the third Republican nominee and likely chairman, but he has not been formally named.
Glick’s nomination may be an effort to appease Democrats and enable simultaneous votes on all three nominees. If that’s the case, FERC will have to wait on a White House notorious for its slowness in officially submitting nominations and for Glick to go through the committee process.
Honorable’s “departure again underscores the urgent need to re-establish a quorum at FERC,” Committee Chair Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said yesterday. “Getting the agency back to the normal course of business remains a top priority for me. I will continue to push for a confirmation vote for Neil Chatterjee and Robert Powelson. … I hope my colleagues among the Senate minority will join us in enabling a quick vote for Mr. Chatterjee and Mr. Powelson.”
CARMEL, Ind. — FERC on Monday approved a proposal by PJM and MISO to create a new category of small interregional transmission projects while cautioning that the measure could see future revisions.
The proposal updates the PJM-MISO joint operating agreement with a targeted market efficiency project (TMEP) type, which applies to projects that reduce historical congestion along the RTOs’ seams.
Still, in its June 26 delegated order, FERC staff said that preliminary analysis indicates the proposal has “not been shown to be just or reasonable” and left open to the possibility that it could be subject to refund after being implemented (ER17-721). The RTOs are eligible to use the project type starting June 28.
The RTOs filed jointly last year to create TMEPs to encourage construction of cost-effective and congestion-relieving seams projects that might otherwise be overlooked because of their low cost and small size. Their proposal stipulates that TMEPs cost less than $20 million, be in service within three years of approval, and within four years of operation provide congestion relief equal to or greater than the cost of construction. Costs will be apportioned to MISO and PJM based on the percentage of congestion relief benefits accruing to each RTO.
The RTOs have so far identified $17.25 million worth of upgrades in five TMEP candidate projects, and expect those projects to deliver a 5.8:1 benefit-cost-ratio and realize $100 million in benefits within four years of going in service. (See MISO-PJM TMEP Projects Drop to Five.) Both RTOs hope to finish evaluation of TMEP candidates by September and seek respective board approvals by the end of the year.
Exelon, the Organization of MISO States, Northern Indiana Public Service Co., the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission and ITC Mid Atlantic Development supported the proposal in comments to FERC. MISO South regulators protested the filing, claiming that the RTOs’ benefits analysis fails to take congestion hedging revenues into consideration.
Speaking on behalf of the MISO Transmission Owners sector, Ameren Senior Director of Transmission Policy Dennis Kramer said that the factoring in of congestion hedging revenues would “complicate” the TMEP study process.
“Excluding the congestion hedge costs is consistent with the TMEP goal of straightforward, efficient metrics that can be easily reproduced by stakeholders,” Kramer said in comments submitted for a June 13 FERC workshop on the TMEP issue. “Adding congestion hedges … would fundamentally change the nature of the TMEPs by changing the study from a simple analysis of historical flowgate congestion to a multifaceted deconstruction of a series of complex financial hedging instruments which differ in each RTO. Such action would counteract the RTOs’ ability to implement the quick-hit, high-value project types.”
Regional Cost Allocation
FERC must still also act on separate proposals by MISO and PJM regarding how they plan to allocate their portion of TMEP costs regionally.
MISO plans to pursue a bifurcated cost allocation, using a local transmission pricing zone when the constraint exists on lines belonging to one or more MISO transmission owners. For constraints wholly within PJM, MISO is seeking a postage stamp allocation for the entire MISO Midwest region.
However, MISO missed its targeted April filing deadline to complete a regional cost allocation because it needed more time to develop the process with stakeholders. Spokesman Mark Adrian Brown said the RTO will submit an allocation proposal “as soon as possible.”
PJM in April filed a regional cost allocation proposal that would assign TMEP costs to zones and merchant transmission facilities “that are shown to have experienced net positive congestion over the two historical years prior to the TMEP study period” (ER17-1406).
ERCOT’s Technical Advisory Committee has canceled its June meeting because of a lack of voting items.
The TAC’s next scheduled meeting is July 27. The Board of Directors does not meet again until Aug. 8.
TAC Chair Adrianne Brandt, of San Antonio’s CPS Energy, asked committee members to vote by email on a pair of revision requests, setting a 5 p.m. deadline Wednesday for responses:
NOGRR170: Revises the Nodal Operating Guide to be consistent with NPRR824 language related to NERC Reliability Standards EOP-011-1 (Emergency Operations) and BAL-001-2 (Real Power Balancing Control Performance).
RRGRR014: Conforms the Resource Registration glossary to the as-built release, which captured baseline updates before the approvals of RRGRR006 and RRGRR007. The RRGRR adds solar resource registration inputs omitted from the greybox tab for RRGRR009.
New Hampshire regulators on Friday took the first step toward an overhaul of their net metering rules, reducing compensation for rooftop solar owners while ordering a study of the value of distributed generation that will inform long-term changes.
Solar Panels at Exeter High School
The Public Utilities Commission ordered utilities to implement a new alternative net metering tariff that retains monthly netting for small distributed generation system owners while moving to instantaneous netting for non-bypassable charges. The rules, “to be in effect for a period of several years,” will begin Sept. 1 (Order 26,029).
The commission chose a quasi-adjudicative process to reconcile two settlement proposals on how to develop and implement a new alternative net metering tariff, as directed by the state legislature last year in House Bill 1116.
Two Proposals
One settlement proposal came from a coalition of utilities and consumer parties (UCC), including Eversource Energy, Liberty Utilities, Unitil Energy Systems, the state Office of Consumer Advocate, the New England Ratepayers Association, Consumer Energy Alliance and Standard Power of America.
The other proposal was filed the same day by a coalition of distributed generation industry advocates and environmental organizations known as the Energy Future Coalition (EFC), which included the Acadia Center, The Alliance for Solar Choice, the Conservation Law Foundation and eight other organizations and companies (docket DE 16-576).
In its unanimous 74-page order, the commission ruled that:
Small customer-generators with renewable energy systems of 100 kW or less will continue to net meter their DG resources monthly. Those customer-generators will receive monthly net export credits equal to the monetary value of kilowatt-hour charges for energy service and transmission service at 100% and distribution service at 25% — a 75% reduction — while paying the full amount of non-bypassable charges, such as the system benefits charge, stranded cost recovery charge, other similar surcharges and the state electricity consumption tax. Previously, they received kilowatt-hour credits.
Large customer-generators will continue to be net-metered as they are currently but will also receive monetary credits rather than kilowatt-hour credits on a monthly basis. To qualify for alternative net metering, large customers must consume at least 20% of their actual or estimated annual distributed generation system electric production behind the meter.
DG systems installed or queued during the period the new net metering tariff is in effect will have their net metering rate structure grandfathered until Dec. 31, 2040.
Pilot projects will be proposed and a value of DER study will be designed and completed to “inform the development of the next version of net metering or another alternative regulatory mechanism.”
“As the penetration level of DG in the state is quite low in both absolute and relative terms, there is little evidence of significant cost-shifting from DG customers to customers without DG,” the commission said. “Payment of non-bypassable charges by all net-metered customers and a reduction in the distribution credit for net exports should serve to mitigate the potential for such cost-shifting, even if DG penetration levels increase significantly above their low levels.”
The commission said it accepted common elements in the two settlement proposals and resolved differences between them based on the legislative purposes of HB 1116. The bill called for “the continuance of reasonable opportunities for electric customers to invest in and interconnect customer-generator facilities and receive fair compensation for such locally produced power while ensuring costs and benefits are fairly and transparently allocated among all customers.”
The order requires Eversource, Liberty (Granite State Electric) and Unitil to file revised tariffs within 30 days. The commission also approved an automatic rate adjustment mechanism for the companies to recover lost revenue, under the process approved for Unitil in February (Order No. 25,991).
Value of DER Study
The order provides that the alternative net metering tariff take effect while the utilities and stakeholders collect further data, implement pilot programs and conduct a study on the value of DERs.
It directs stakeholders to convene working groups within 60 days to develop proposals on the commission’s mandates. It also requires them to file quarterly progress reports with the PUC. The order also gives concerned parties 30 days to submit written briefs or comments on grandfathering issues, such as the clause that “customer-generators that receive a net metering capacity allocation while the new alternative net metering tariff is in effect to be ‘grandfathered’ at the applicable net metering design and structure then in effect through Dec. 31, 2040.”
Reaction
“The ruling is a mixed bag,” CLF attorney Melissa E. Birchard said.
While the order is an overall win for the state because it sets a path forward to value the broad benefits of clean energy resources and accelerates grid modernization, Birchard said she was dismayed by the cut in the distribution credit.
“It is disturbing to see cuts to an important program like net metering at the same time that New Hampshire is lagging behind the rest of the region on solar penetration and energy efficiency,” Birchard said. “If we’re not careful, other states in the region are going to reap the financial benefits of strong solar and energy efficiency programs while Granite Staters pay more on their electric bill for a disproportionate share of the costs.”
Nashua, New Hampshire Dam
While the distribution portion of the credit is only one piece of the overall credit, “this cut is arbitrary in the sense that there was no real data in the docket to support it, and it will affect the pace of clean energy investments,” Birchard said.
Gradual Change
The commission said that an abrupt change from monthly netting to instantaneous netting would likely confuse customers and send potentially inefficient price signals.
“For example, instantaneous netting may be confusing to customers who lack real-time data about their electricity usage,” said the order. “It may also provide financial incentives for maximum on-site electric consumption during periods when the benefits of DG exports to the system may be greatest, such as at the time of late afternoon system peaks, thereby decreasing the potential system-wide benefits of those energy exports.”
Birchard believes the cuts in net metering will be temporary.
“There should be a new rate established after the commission carries out a value of distributed energy resources study, particularly distributed solar and hydro, and after that study it’s going to open a proceeding to revalue it,” said Birchard. “So the credits that those resources receive will be based on the broad benefits, potentially including climate change and health benefits. That kind of value-based rate can make clean energy innovation more competitive in an open market way so that different kinds of resources can compete with each other based on their value.”
