Growing California power system reliability threats made vivid by early September Flex Alerts called by the state’s system operator could be relieved by a price signal based on real-time pricing, or RTP, linked to smart customer-owned resources through new enabling technologies, according to the California Public Utilities Commission Energy Division’s June 22 ”CalFUSE” proposal.
The new approach could transform California’s high penetrations of customer-owned distributed energy resources into a response to electricity market supply and load fluctuations, commissioners agreed in a July 14 order opening a proceeding to investigate the proposal’s potential.