The Maryland Public Service Commission will hold a meeting to consider proposed regulations from a workgroup on the Montgomery County Community Choice Aggregation Pilot Program. The workgroup is tasked with submitting an annual report to the commission detailing the status of the aggregator pilot. The commission is required to establish standards and procedures to protect the rights of residential customers who receive electricity supply through the aggregator, including prohibition of discrimination on the basis of customer location. RM80

The New York Public Service Commission will hold a technical conference to discuss a whitepaper as part of its midpoint review of the Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Make-Ready program run by the state’s large investor-owned electric utilities. The review examines plug targets, budgets, incentive levels, and disadvantaged community budget allocation. The whitepaper provides recommendations to improve the program including increasing the initiative’s budget from $701 million to $1.108 billion and updating the plug targets, extending the program’s deadline beyond Jan. 1, 2025 if the plug targets are not met, and creating a $25 million micromobility make-ready program targeting disadvantaged communities. 18-E-0138

The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission is due to receive comments on a residential adder for the 2023 value-of-solar rate of Xcel Energy Inc.’s Community Solar Garden program. The commission recently approved modifications to the applicable retail rate, or ARR, calculation for the program. Most of the program subscribers receive a bill credit based on the ARR – currently, there are 737 gardens receiving the ARR and 190 gardens receiving the value-of-solar rate, according to the company’s compliance report submitted in April. As of March 2023, there are 31,337 subscriptions or premises in the Solar*Rewards Community Minnesota program, with residential customers accounting for 87 percent of the overall number of subscriptions. M-13-867

The Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission and Department of Commerce will hold their third annual meeting on the adequacy of energy resources to serve the state’s electric power needs. The meeting will include presentations and discussions on recent assessments of electricity demand and supply, the electric power industry’s progress in developing a coordinated resource adequacy program, and actions utilities are taking to ensure adequate resources. Legislation enacted earlier this year expanded the scope of these meetings to address strategies for sufficient power supply to avoid the risk of rolling outages, include a discussion on the need for new state policy, and identify current regulatory and statutory incentives to enhance and ensure resource adequacy and reliability. UE-210096

The California Independent System Operator Corp. will hold a virtual working group meeting to discuss the second track of its 2023 Interconnection Process Enhancements, or IPE, initiative aimed to enhance coordination of resource procurement and interconnection, resource planning, and transmission planning to achieve state reliability and policy needs. At a recent meeting, the grid operator reviewed a list of proposed principles for the initiative including prioritizing interconnection zones where transmission capacity exists or new transmission has been approved and limiting the amount of studies to reasonable capacity volumes that align with state resource planning. The workshop will discuss stakeholder proposals related to queue management.

The Idaho Public Utilities Commission will host customer hearings on Avista Corp.’s applications to increase rates for natural gas and electric service. Under the terms of a proposed settlement filed in June, parties agreed that Avista should be allowed to increase its annual base electric revenues by $22.1 million effective Sept. 1, 2023 and $4.3 million effective Sept. 1, 2024. For natural gas, the settlement is designed to increase annual base revenues by $1.3 million and $3,000 effective Sept. 1, 2023 and Sept. 1, 2024, respectively. The revisions would raise rates for electric and natural gas customers by 8 percent and 2.7 percent, respectively, in the first rate year. AVU-G-23-01