DIRECT ACCESS WORKING GROUPTEXT FOR DRAFT REPORT ON AGGREGATION

Date: July 24, 1996

6.1.2.2 Municipalities Cities and counties use electricity for municipal buildings, water and sewer utilities, traffic control signals, and street lighting. They take electric service under a variety of rate schedules: small and medium commercial, industrial, traffic control, and street lighting. Municipalities wish to have flexibility in their aggregation. Some municipalities would want to aggregate all of their municipal electric loads. Other municipalities may want to diversify their aggregations. For example, a city with a water utility could be interested in aggregating the water utility's electric requirements with water districts, such as the statewide aggregation organized by the Association of California Water Agencies - Utility Services Agency (ACWA-USA). Other municipalities would want to combine their entire municipal electric loads through a regional aggregation. They may want to use an existing or form a new joint powers authority to purchase electricity for specific uses, such as street lighting. There are municipalities that are interested in aggregating not only their own municipal electric loads but also the electric requirements of consumers within their governmental boundaries. For example, a city would want the opportunity of aggregating all electric consumers within its city limits. This aggregation arrangement should be voluntary. Finally, in any aggregation, municipalities would search for the most beneficial group, which is why street lighting may be aggregated with other electric uses. Street lighting provides an opportunity of optimizing load profiles. Street lighting's off-peak, nighttime, usage could be paired with high summer peak loads in order to flatten the load requirement.

6.1.3.1 Load Size A municipality, such as a city or county, perceives itself as a single customer of the public utility, even though it has numerous accounts, which are billed according to different rate schedules. In contrast, from the view point of the utility, a single municipality is seen as many customers, since there are many accounts. Furthermore, the municipal accounts are grouped according to different customer classes: small and medium commercial, industrial, and street lighting. Aggregation rules that set aggregation limits by customer classes should take into account that municipalities cross customer groupings. Municipal accounts fall within the commercial, industrial and street lighting customer classes. Moreover, special consideration needs to be made for street lighting, given the small load for a single street light. The average street light consumes only 52 kWh per month and causes a maximum demand of 150 watts. If order to satisfy the aggregation limit of 8 MW, 53,300 street lights would have to be aggregated. Only large cities, with populations over 500,000, have that many street lights. In fact, the number of street lights in California cities and counties varies immensely, depending upon the size of the municipality and urban development. The 8 MW limit would preclude most cities and counties from aggregating their street lighting loads except through regional aggregation programs. A similar problem exists for traffic signals. Based on sales and demand data presented in general rate cases, in order to meet the 8 MW limit, approximately one-third of all traffic signals in SCE's and PG&E's territories would have to be aggregated. For SDG&E, aggregation of all traffic signals would not reach the 8 MW limit. Any MW limit would restrict individual cities and counties in aggregating their own traffic signals' loads. MW limits would preclude street light customers and traffic signal customers from participating in direct access. In order to allow these customers to participate in the direct access program, there should be no MW limits. Prepared by Reed V. SchmidtBartle Wells Associates, July 24, 1996Telephone: 415/775-3113Fax: 415/775-4123e-mail: bwa@slip.netOn behalf of the California City-County Street Light Association