The District of Columbia Public Service Commission will hold a technical conference on Washington Gas Light Company’s leak reduction and management practices. The conference will explore the most effective technologies and procedures for detecting natural gas leaks in urban areas, including both current practices and innovative approaches to improve accuracy and efficiency. The commission will continue previous discussion on advanced leak detection and add the topic of lost and accounted for gas.

The Connecticut Public Utility Regulatory Authority will convene its thirteenth technical meeting to consider potential modifications and additions to revenue adjustment mechanisms as part of its performance-based regulation, or PBR, framework. The meeting will include a roundtable discussion among participants regarding the return on equity calculation methodology used in a PBR rate case, and the relationship of the calculation to performance incentive mechanisms. In April 2023, the authority adopted a comprehensive framework of regulatory goals, foundational considerations, and priority outcomes to guide future electric utility regulation. The decision also includes the implementation of specific reforms through a series of reopened proceedings to explore the regulatory mechanisms and PBR elements namely, revenue adjustment mechanisms, performance mechanisms, and integrated distribution system planning.

The Rhode Island Public Utilities Commission will conduct a hearing on Rhode Island Energy’s 2025 Annual Energy Efficiency and Conservation Procurement Program Plan, built for the second year of a three-year plan approved earlier this year. The plan provides firm savings goals, budgets, funding plans, and a proposed performance incentive mechanism earning opportunity. Further, the plan provides more detail on the strategies, market approaches, programs, and measures that will be offered in the 2025 calendar year. The 2025 plan budget for electric programs is $81.95 million and gas programs is $35.05 million.

The New York Public Service Commission will hold a meeting of the electric vehicle infrastructure interconnection working group to discuss recent modifications to a straw proposal on streamlining queue management in the EV make-ready program. The proposal aims to facilitate a supportive process for make-ready applicants from first contact with a utility to EV station energization. The meeting will include a summary on the recent modifications and provide an opportunity for the working group to discuss the next steps to finalize the proposal. The working group was formed to identify, discuss, and resolve the technical barriers and challenges associated with the EV interconnection process, including queue management and EV-specific standardized interconnection requirements.

The Washington Department of Ecology will issue a summary report of its eighth greenhouse gas allowance auction, which offered allowances for current and future years. The current auction offered 2023 and 2024 allowances totaling nearly 8 million and the advance auction offered 2027 allowances totaling about 2.2 million. At the previous auction, allowance prices settled at $29.88 per allowance. Washington voters on Nov. 5 rejected Initiative 2117, a ballot measure that sought to repeal the 2021 Climate Commitment Act, which established the cap-and-invest program, a key component of the state’s efforts to achieve emission limits set in law and progress toward net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

The California Energy Commission is due to receive comments on the draft 2024 Integrated Energy Policy Report, or IEPR, Update. The commission prepares an IEPR report every two years that includes assessments and forecasts of all aspects of energy industry supply, production, transportation, delivery and distribution, demand, and prices. The draft report addresses an updated 15-year electricity demand forecast with the latest demographic and economic data including scenarios that estimate the potential impacts of the state’s decarbonization strategies and other sources of load growth like increases in the number of data centers in the state.