SATURDAY BRIEFING: CPUC Tees Up DER Market-Design Battle; PG&E's Mosquito Fire Bill Comes In at $22M

Good afternoon.

The CPUC is beginning to turn years of discussion about flexible distributed resources into a concrete regulatory framework. New questions in the High DER proceeding ask parties to define how utility pilots, open-access platforms and CPUC-led working groups should fit together and to quantify the ratepayer savings that DER orchestration could produce.

Elsewhere, the CPUC's Safety and Enforcement Division has proposed a $22 million Mosquito Fire settlement with PG&E that subjects the utility’s transmission-repair review process to an independent examination. Separately, a proposed decision would create a far more granular annual record of customer outages.

Last, an email ruling clears testimony and hearings from the Demand Response bridge-year funding dispute, setting up a decision on the written record.