Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Jake Marren (Staff Attorney, Vermont Public Utility Commission)]: You're live. Okay, good morning. This is Center of

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair, Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy)]: Natural Resources and Energy, and this is Tuesday, January 13, I believe, yes. And we are starting the morning talking about S202, which is about portable solar, what we can also call it, balcony solar, plug in solar. And we're joined by Mr. Rupoor from the Department of Public Service. So welcome.

[Michael Desrochers (Executive Director, Vermont Division of Fire Safety)]: Thank you.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair, Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy)]: Yeah, I'll let you just jump right in. All right, great. Well for

[T.J. Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: the record, T. J. Ripore, Public Service Department, Director of Regulated Utility Bennington. So today, thank you for having the department in. I'll describe where the department currently is with regard to S202 and some observations and concerns that have addressed that I think would enable us to support the bill and overall really safety, consumer protections including affordability are paramount in our review and consideration of the bill. Excuse me, so a little out of breath, we're puzzling over here. So I'll start with safety and acknowledge that I'm not an expert on safety and I like to go in there but so I'll let Mr. Barossa and utilities primarily speak to safety but I bring it up because it is a top of mind and really appreciate component of the bill that references the underwriters, laboratories, certification and wanted to point out, I'll provide a copy of my written testimony afterwards, but point out that UL Solutions which is kind of a spin off and advocacy arm of Underwriters Laboratories issued a paper in December that concluded that risk mitigation requirements are necessary to allow the state of use of plumbing and photovoltaics and in the absence of those measures they can present electric shock hazards, fire hazards, super. So just talk about this, think you guys know this already and that's why you have the UL listed in there, but I just wanted to emphasize that and I think that is that's great. I think they've actually started recently in the last few days the process for certifying the systems and listing them. One thing to consider in that provision and still kind of getting to the bottom of this but the two zero two says requires a UL certification as opposed to a UL listing and my understanding is that UL listed devices are like actually complete finished devices that meet the safety standards where UL certified refers to individual components or safety performance systems. So as I understand it, this thing's more of the preferred for consumer standalone products and you might want to consider changing that to do all the things required as opposed to certification. And you should circle back with other witnesses on that, but to confirm that, that does not work out. So I'll leave the rest of safety considerations to others, but really again emphasize that those are paramount. Going to the structure of how plug in PV would work, designed the bill doesn't allow for them to be that metered but it looks like it does allow for exports of the grid. And so where my understanding is that it's currently structured, a customer would offset real time consumption at the variable retail rate, which makes a lot of sense at the time, right? That's great. When exporting to the grid, any generation that's netted with consumption within a month could still receive the retail rate. Anything you should really check with the utilities on exactly how that's going to work because with AMI meters they could have different channels and there's not necessarily it's unclear whether the bill requires compensation at the retail rate of real time exported generation. I think we would prefer that it didn't, it's exporting and so at the retail rate and that's going to be, the retail rate would be a much

[Jake Marren (Staff Attorney, Vermont Public Utility Commission)]: higher value than what that generation is for.

[T.J. Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: I also in terms of the structure just suggest you ask the utilities about potential issues with bypassing the interconnection rule. The rule really was recently updated with best practices from the interstate renewable energy council which would ensure any inadvertent export from all systems not configured to export that they all have utility review. And I think that circle back, I think to some of the safety questions that I said I was not an expert on, but I wanted to draw your attention to the rule that was just passed that was gonna deal with some export. We're gonna move on to some observations on the cost to consumers. So right now, new technology for The United States, so expensive here, right? It presents a real option for renters, which I think is great, but it is an expensive option. So a 1.2 kW system, which is the maximum here, might produce roughly a thousand kilowatt hours in a year. It's a 10% capacity factor. A residential rooftop is probably at 15%. So I wouldn't expect these to be cited in the bath even as well as rooftops. So at 20¢ a kilowatt hour credit, that's $200 a year. Bright saver was here the other day and testified that it was that right now it's at $3 a lot for these systems. So let's say those costs drop by a third, it's still a significant upfront cost $2,400 and that would be a twelve year payback just using the assumptions I had. Maybe it gets down a lot less than that, but that's really expensive. So I just want to make sure that everybody's clear that that's not when discussing this proposed legislation and the appliance, it's not necessarily something that low income Vermonters are going to be able to access. Just to

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair, Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy)]: process those numbers because it's sometimes hard to hear the math. I'm hoping that the math is in your test. Yes. Yes,

[T.J. Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: it'll be in what

[Jake Marren (Staff Attorney, Vermont Public Utility Commission)]: I said

[T.J. Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: in the second portion. So for now at least and recognizing kind of technology cost curves that could go down and rates are on an upward trajectory as we point out regularly, right? So, for now, this is a measure for those that can afford it, right? And that could be okay as long as there's not state or ratepayer subsidies for it. And then in our minds similar to the Utah structure that generation SX-four is compensated because that's effectively a concession. Then finally, just want to mention consumer protection. We have a consumer affairs division that gets a lot of calls on this kind of thing with new products come out. So will in my written testimony point to a clean energy states alliance publication that really suggests that as a new product, states may want to prolongate consumer protection requirements, claims for savings, regulations and safety to have mechanisms to encourage those safe installations, clear guidelines, education, how to materials, etcetera, that all needs to be developed. Just along those lines, it may be worth inviting the attorney general's office for their opinion on it just to see consumer protection issues directly. The other thing is kind of consumer awareness and education is just different than other states I think, just observe that with a 100% renewable energy standard, clean energy standard, the measure doesn't have impact on Vermont's greenhouse gas emissions, at least as measured by our greenhouse gas report. And so people may be willing to invest for climate reasons, but if they're not actually doing something, we just want to be real clear about that. So just conclusion to conceptually, I think there's a lot of good components of S202 and we, so long as safety concerns are met, issues around exported generation are managed and some of these consumer protection issues are elevated, then I think

[Jake Marren (Staff Attorney, Vermont Public Utility Commission)]: we could be supportive of that.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair, Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy)]: Thank you. I have one question for you. Want to circle back to the question about the retail rate being compensated to the consumer. So we're not making this eligible for net metering. So it's possible that, of course, that over the course of a month, your meter does not run quite as much. So when you talk about like the compensation, are in my mind, there's not a good way to measure necessarily how much it's generating. If the meter is just running slower, can you just speak a little bit more about that?

[T.J. Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: So at least for utilities with advanced metering infrastructure, they should be able to measure on an hourly basis when

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair, Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy)]: they're exporting. Right.

[T.J. Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: So that's really what I'm talking about here. So on a monthly basis, I think it's probably pretty unlikely that we'd be exporting on a monthly basis, but then we're still the utilities will still need to manage that operationally that daily or risk I guess of exporting. And you know depending on the size of the systems and the homes it could be a small amount but you know it as this technology grows in popularity that you know eventually could grow. One other thing to think about would be you know a check-in at some point once it gets to a certain amount of penetrations and how this is going, that could actually maybe alleviate some of those issues as well once we reach

[Jake Marren (Staff Attorney, Vermont Public Utility Commission)]: a certain threshold. Yeah, it's gonna be good. Super cool. Thank you. Any other questions?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: No, I think the test will be taken a lot to get to the point that it was actually meltingly indenturinated cell way that it would take a long and take a awful lot of these for that to actually have with her. Oh, in

[T.J. Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: a month. Export in a month, they would take an awful lot. But in hourly, I think that could happen. I mean, they need to shut off everything in your house and your hot water heater isn't like hitting on and Oh, I may. I'm sorry.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: In a cube to where you live

[T.J. Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: as well. It would have

[Unidentified Committee Member]: to be thousands of things. Oh, right. Still really make the difference.

[T.J. Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: To kind of like a utility cost basis, I think the answer is yes on that. Super,

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair, Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy)]: thank you. Any other questions? Okay, super, thank you so much. Okay, and we're gonna move to Mr. Khabrushy, welcome.

[Michael Desrochers (Executive Director, Vermont Division of Fire Safety)]: Good morning.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair, Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy)]: Good morning, and have I said your name today? Derocher, okay, Division of Fire Safety, welcome. So

[Michael Desrochers (Executive Director, Vermont Division of Fire Safety)]: for the record, I'm like Earl Carroll Nick Jackman's director for the Division of Fire Safety, and I'll start it out first by saying, I appreciate the committee reaching out to us in advance for the likes of the comments on the draft. It's nice to get in front of this stuff sometimes, right? So I appreciate that. First and foremost is, I think the committee should hear from Dennis Blair. He's our Chief Electrical Inspector and he also chairs in the Electrical Licensing Board. And I think he could do a pretty good, quick, technical overview on how these things actually function, like how the inverters work, all that stuff. We didn't have a lot from an electrical a lot of concern here, a couple issues, one being that these units have to be plugged into a receptacle, if it's an outside receptacle that would have to be ground fault, GFCI protected. We're a little bit concerned about whether if balconies and so forth are locking an outlet receptacle, they're gonna take extension cords and run those somehow, either through sliding doors or whatever route they want to find. So that's a little bit of a concern for us, is the use of extension cords. I'm not certain there's any UL listed systems out there even out there right now, but I know for sure that if you go to Amazon and all these other online platforms, that you can order basically anything you want, you can piecemeal these things together. And, you know, part of our responsibility too is to protect our emergency responders. And so energy storage systems, EV charging, all this kind of stuff does impact our emergency responders. I'm not sure because of the low generation of power that these actually will be a concern for emergency services. But nationally, this is starting to catch some attention nationally too. So it's, I think what I've determined is an emerging issue that is coming. But other than that, we don't have jurisdiction over these units, as far as electrical wiring, so we can't require like an electrical wear of lipless to be filed because it's a plug in appliance. So under our statutory authority right now, we can't regulate from an electrical perspective. If we go on and do an inspection in response to a complaint or something else, and we find out the unit is not installed properly or protected, whatever, then we can address that. But we can't upfront regulate the installation of this equipment. A little bit of a concern there, but I just wanted to mention that. It's really not under our purview as far as, right? And other than that, I think there'll be a little bit of opposition maybe from condominium associations and all that, where they have pretty strict bylaws on what you can't do with your condo units and so forth, so there will be some, maybe some pushback on the consumer side there. But other than that, we're pretty much neutral and like if know, that just unfolds or whatever, we're probably not objecting to this.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair, Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy)]: Great. Super. Any questions? Super. And thank you for that suggestion to have Mr. Blair in. I think we will do that. And I want to jump back actually to the document that Mr. Ford referenced. What is it, the Clean Energy Alliance?

[Jake Marren (Staff Attorney, Vermont Public Utility Commission)]: Energy States Alliance.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair, Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy)]: States Alliance. So I did get a chance to look at that ahead of time, and it called out some specific safety concerns that I think we can go into, which I hope will, I assume will be covered by a potential UL listing.

[Michael Desrochers (Executive Director, Vermont Division of Fire Safety)]: I am waiting to hear back from underwriter's laboratory. I have a colleague, senior design engineer at UL, because there is a difference between certified and listed. So he's gonna detail that for me and I'll provide his direct response to the community.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair, Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy)]: That would be

[Michael Desrochers (Executive Director, Vermont Division of Fire Safety)]: very helpful. But I agree with what you're saying there. There is a difference.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair, Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy)]: Yep, yep, absolutely. Because the whole thing hinges on whether or not this can be done safely. Yep, yep. Super. Well, thank you so much.

[Michael Desrochers (Executive Director, Vermont Division of Fire Safety)]: Thank you. It's nice meeting you

[Unidentified Committee Member]: all. Okay.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair, Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy)]: And so we're going to move to Mr. Mayor. From the Public Utility Commission.

[Jake Marren (Staff Attorney, Vermont Public Utility Commission)]: Morning. My name is Jake Marron, I'm a staff attorney for the Vermont Public Utility Commission. Overall, the commission I think is neutral about the idea of adopting solar or even supportive, but like the department, I think there are some needs for clarification ensure that the commission can do its job and do it fairly for all our customers. The first thing I want to speak to is just sort of the administrative part of this bill which talks about the commission's role in developing a notice form. We read the bill as requiring the commission to basically develop the piece of paper and what information is included on it, but the commission will not be responsible for receiving those forms through EPUC or otherwise. And also we will not be able to develop a online tool for the utilities to import that data to their system. So basically the utilities will be either receiving that PDF that we create by email or by the mail and using that information for their own purposes, but the commission will be involved in. And in fact, as a general comment, if these systems are not subject to section two forty eight, the commission really sees no role in the commission in regulating these systems. And we prefer to not have that role. But what we do have a role in is ensuring that all customers are billed correctly. And so we see some potential for confusion right now with the bill and it's the issue that TJ raises, how is excess generation treated? And so our understanding of the Utah bill is that excess generation is not compensated. However, every utility's building system and meter infrastructure is different. And so it is very possible that if the bill passed as it's written now, we have 17 utilities, you make it up with 17 different ways of measuring the energy for the customers and what that results in their bills. So we would want to make sure that there's a consistent understanding for the utilities, not only that excess generation is not compensated, but that they actually can do that. And the reason being that some meters, it's an analog meter, it's just going to spin backwards. And so that could be an issue. And some customers are able to opt out of their utility's smart infrastructure and get an analog meter. The other issue we see is that some customers already have net meter solar arrays, and if you add a balcony solar to it, it may not be possible to distinguish output from those systems. You'll have production meter readings which are required for the net metered array, but you'll still have this, the consumption meter is going to reflect both of those systems output. I don't know if you can disentangle those, but you can, again, that's a question for the utilities to make sure that they can do it and that if they are doing it, we're all doing it the same way. Again, the commission's main concern is we can get consumer complaints from customers who want to make sure they're being charged the right amount and we want to know how to answer those complaints and make sure that they're treated fairly. And then the last sort of area we see a need for clarification is how is the capacity of these systems measured and what is the limit on how many of these systems a customer can have. As drafted, the bill defines portable solar devices, know, a solar generation facility that is one, movable and two, does not export to the grid more than 1,200 watts. So that means, at least the way I read that, is that means I could have a much larger system, but if I have some control in place that prevents it from exporting more than 1,200 watts, then that's and it's movable, that's still portable silver. That may be the intent of the building. If that is, that's fine, but again, clarity so we understand what the rules are, I think they're important. And then two, I don't see anything in the building that limits a customer from having several of these systems. So if I have one plugged in on my porch and one plugged in on my upstairs balcony, and then another plugged in for my roof, my flat roof that I've just laid it down on, that could be acceptable under this rule and I could have several kilowatts of this. Maybe I have a commercial refrigerator running all the time and I could use all that power. Again, if that's the intention of the bill, that's fine, but I think it needs to be spelled out what the acceptable limits are for a customer or an account or, and again, this might be

[Michael Desrochers (Executive Director, Vermont Division of Fire Safety)]: really helpful where you talk

[Jake Marren (Staff Attorney, Vermont Public Utility Commission)]: to the utilities because you could have the same address with multiple meters and accounts and multiple customers or one customer, all depends. And so having clarity about what's allowed, I think is important. So some folks said, do we just want to raise these issues? And again, commission doesn't see itself as having a role in regulating what essentially would be appliances that are plugged into people's houses, but we do have to make sure that utilities are treating other customers the same. And to the extent a customer is doing something that is not allowed by that bill, it suddenly becomes a Section two forty eight facility, and then we have to step in. Again, we're pretty comfortable regulating utilities, we're dealing with the challenges of regulating regulating merchant generators, private companies that come in and sell power, but customers, they're not directly regulated by us like the way of businesses. So if we reach out to them for information,

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair, Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy)]: they may not get back

[Jake Marren (Staff Attorney, Vermont Public Utility Commission)]: to us. They're not going

[T.J. Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: to let us into

[Jake Marren (Staff Attorney, Vermont Public Utility Commission)]: their house to inspect what's there, all those issues. So having really clear rules about what's allowed I think is going to really benefit everyone.

[T.J. Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: So could you go back to the part where you talked about if the person's sending, you know they're sending to the grid,

[Jake Marren (Staff Attorney, Vermont Public Utility Commission)]: does that unwind their meter or is that just for they have a smart meter? It depends, so and again I would talk to utilities because each utility they have a different system, but if you have an old analog meter like the old wheel that sends around they spins forward or backwards and if I'm pumping power out to the grid it's gonna roll it backwards, which means that even if that, you know, my orbital solar device is generating more power than I use, I'm still getting essentially credit for that power, would be in my opinion. An actual energy credit. Rare Those may be situations. There may not be many analog meters

[Michael Desrochers (Executive Director, Vermont Division of Fire Safety)]: out there.

[Jake Marren (Staff Attorney, Vermont Public Utility Commission)]: My understanding of modern bidirectional smart meters is that they are capable of measuring on an hourly basis both energy delivered to the grid and, or I shouldn't use the word, energy delivered from the grid or energy exported to the grid. So they'll have two measurements. The issue that I see is that the utilities, when they're generating their bills, don't know if they just look at the net of those two or if they only look at the delivered or if they're considering the export number. And then two, the second thing is if I already have a solar array because I've net metering, data is going to get mixed with my existing net metered solar array as how you disentangle that. The utilities might be able to do that, but it's an issue that I can't answer how it would happen. Well,

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair, Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy)]: that brings me to a question, because those are three very real scenarios. One possibility is that the Public Utility Commission could issue some guidance for utilities so that there is consistency. Because I think you're right, there could very well be 70 different interpretations. I'm not sure if that is something you're prepared to speak to, but I'll throw it up. Yeah, I'm not

[Jake Marren (Staff Attorney, Vermont Public Utility Commission)]: prepared to speak to it. And this is just very, as you may be aware, the commission's budget is extremely constrained. We are running annual deficits. New work from a sort of class of what I'll call customers or system users who aren't paying in either through a gross receipts tax or an application fee, that could be a challenge. I think, and I will try to reach out and talk to some of utilities, but it'd be helpful if this committee could get that in here and ask me these questions. If we get a better sense from them what the challenges are, that developing guidance might be easier, but it also could be a very contested issue where the resources and abilities of our municipal and cooperative utilities is much different than GND. And so what is feasible for one utility may not be feasible for the others.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair, Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy)]: No, that totally makes sense. And we are going to be hearing from the utilities till Thursday.

[Jake Marren (Staff Attorney, Vermont Public Utility Commission)]: I don't forget.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair, Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy)]: Of a Yeah, for sure. Super. I had another question. Any other questions we can make up for folks? I do want to raise one possibility that we've talked about a little bit, which is, let's say you have a college dorm. Right? Like students are really interested in this and maybe they want to plug these in, but it probably just depends on the setup for the individual college, let's say, but as it's written, the way I would interpret that is there's still a limit. You can't export more than 1,200 watts if it's one meter. Right, yeah, I guess my question is,

[Jake Marren (Staff Attorney, Vermont Public Utility Commission)]: my understanding of the interpretive purpose of these is really that they shouldn't be exporting significantly ever, so that you're sizing these things to sort of what's my base minimum load at the building. So it's not that they never export, but they would be sort of the exception as opposed to something that's happening all the time. In the example you gave, it's really hard for me to predict what this looks like in an application because my understanding of the UL process, that is going to likely result in these not being connected to outlets that also are on surface with load. In the dorm example, unless there's a dedicated generation DC plug that the university has installed, I'm not sure that's going to really happen. It might just be

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair, Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy)]: a moved kind of question, maybe

[Jake Marren (Staff Attorney, Vermont Public Utility Commission)]: because it I've may not be been reading about balcony solar for like six or seven years now, because I really wanted to install one in my own property, and like, you know, the amount of crap work that I think you'll have to do to put one in, you'll need to make sure your panel has extra space for a breaker in it and then run a wire from that new breaker just to one outlet with nothing else on it, then that outlet is the only thing where you're plugging in the solar. That's probably what it looks like, but again, we'll have to see what actually, what the VDL process churns out and actually allows. Because I've also read that if you have really, really small systems, maybe those

[Michael Desrochers (Executive Director, Vermont Division of Fire Safety)]: can be plugged, but you can't

[Jake Marren (Staff Attorney, Vermont Public Utility Commission)]: other places. So yeah, I think it's like the previous witness said, this is emerging and what this looks like in practice is a bit of an unknown.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair, Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy)]: Yeah. Okay, any other questions at this point? All right, thank you Appreciate so your testimony. And if you have anything written, if you can send it to our thesis team, would be great.

[Jake Marren (Staff Attorney, Vermont Public Utility Commission)]: Hey, look, sorry.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair, Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy)]: Thank you. Thank you. Okay, well we are I thought it would take so much longer for us to go through all of that. I think we're

[T.J. Poor (Director of Regulated Utility Planning, Vermont Department of Public Service)]: done.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair, Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy)]: I think we're done for the day.