Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Materials and papers that were used in this meeting:

• Pricing (30k PDF)
• Planning (30k PDF)
• Cost-effectiveness (80k PDF)
• Background (190k PowerPoint)
• Bonneville Power Administration (20k PowerPoint)
• Pacific Power (240k PowerPoint)
• National Review (350k PDF) of Demand Response and Market Potential

Invitation

The Pacific Northwest Demand Response Project (PNDRP) is a collaborative dialogue forming in 2007 to address issues that will affect the nature of grid investment and electric service in the region. The project is supported by the four states, Bonneville Power Administration, consumer-owned utilities and the Council. These groups recognize that improvements in the way demand response and other demand resources are considered in utility planning and investment practices may be in the public interest, and that a regional dialogue that includes utilities, government officials, providers of innovative solutions from the private sector, and other advocates may accelerate the pace of these improvements, and cause them to be more consistent across the region. The Regulatory Assistance Project will facilitate this process, with additional assistance from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and with support from the U.S. DOE.

To this end, I want to invite you to the first meeting of PNDRP on Wednesday, May 2, 2007 at the Council’s office in Portland.

Generally, these meetings will enable stakeholders to learn about:

• best practices;
• promising ideas being tried or considered here and elsewhere that might be applied in the four states; and (perhaps most importantly)
• the views of others in the region, while allowing all to share their best ideas.

These meetings will also allow the group to find what consensus might exist about reforms, so they will strike a balance between education and discussion. The first meeting will review the status of demand response in the region, and how it may be useful in a hydroelectric-rich electric system. We will consider the lessons from the summer of 2006, when capacity margins became thin for a short time due to a confluence of events. And we will review the particular tasks of interest to government and design a plan to address each of them over the next several months.

The process will only be valuable if it can develop “products” that utilities and their overseeing entities (state regulators or governing boards) can use to improve service and value to customers. To this end, PNDRP will form task groups at the appropriate times to dig into issues, develop solutions and implementation plans, and report these back to the full group. The areas of focus identified by government officials as most important are:

• Developing one or more model retail pricing systems that will better convey to customers the actual costs that their use imposes on the power system;
• Developing ways for integrating demand response and other distributed resources into transmission and distribution planning and investment;
• Developing a common way to measure the cost-effectiveness of demand response and perhaps other distributed resources, such as advanced metering.

Other areas of focus may emerge during the course of PNDRP.

I look forward to joining with you to identify and begin the process of implementing innovations on the demand side of the electric system in the Pacific Northwest.

If you'll be able to attend the meeting in person or by phone, please email me. Thank you.

Richard Sedano

Project Director
The Regulatory Assistance Project

Agenda