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N.Y. Staff Propose Lowering Hourly Pricing Cutoff at O&R
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December
13, 2010
Staff of the New York Public Service Commission has proposed lowering the cutoff
for mandatory hourly pricing at Orange & Rockland to 300 kW from the current 500
kW cutoff. Staff's recommendation came in testimony in O&R's electric rate case
(10-
O&R has 113 customers, comprising approximately 46 MW of load, with individual maximum demand levels above 300 kW but below 500 kW. Of those 113 customers, 90 receive their commodity from an ESCO.
Staff did not propose a detailed schedule for the transition to a 300 kW cutoff, but suggested that O&R could order and install the required interval meters by the fall of 2011 and then start billing at the mandatory hourly rates by the fall of 2012. The exact schedule would be left to an O&R compliance filing. Staff recommended that customers be given a year to compile interval meter data before commencing hourly pricing.
Similar to the expansion to 500 kW customers, Staff recommended an outreach and education plan consisting of (1) the use of live seminars to provide information on hourly pricing to customers, consultants, and ESCOs; (2) workshops scheduled close to the launch of hourly tariff expansion; (3) offering training to both retail access and full service customers; and (4) offering expanded coverage of energy efficiency topics from NYSERDA.
Consistent with the current hourly pricing tariff, customers taking service under Rider G, NYPA Economic Development Power (EDP), or Rider J, NYPA Power for Jobs Rider, would be exempt from hourly pricing under the expansion.
Staff cited the benefits from expanded hourly pricing as including, "potential reductions to peak period prices, enhanced peak period reliability, wholesale market power mitigation, a reduction in dependence on natural gas fueled generation, and more equitable pricing of customer bills than provided by the existing, less exact, average energy rate."
"The threshold should be lowered because customers of this size are likely to have the resources to monitor and react to [hourly pricing] and most other utilities are moving to this threshold level," Staff testified.
O&R has estimated that expanded hourly pricing would entail $124,000 in capital costs and $27,000 in annual operating and maintenance (O&M) costs.
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