It’s a busy week this week at the Commission. Today (March 15, 2021) is the Integrated Resource Planning (IRP) workshop. This is essentially a meeting to have major electric utilities and stakeholders present how they are handling the integration of their resources going into the future. What they are planning and how they plan to get there (to a small degree) will be discussed.
Then on Thursday (March 18, 2021) we have an Energy Reliability Summit. This spawned from the recent energy issues in Texas. It is designed to have our local state utilities give an update and a chance for the Commissioners and Staff to ask questions. We want to make sure AZ isn’t susceptible to the same type of issues, and won’t be massively impacted by other states issues going forward.
Friday (March 19, 2021) is a meeting discussing appointments to the line sighting committee. This is essentially interviewing the candidates to fill the open position and voting on who should fill the seat. This will likely be entirely an executive meeting and won’t have much interesting content.
Then next Tuesday and Wednesday is the monthly Open Meeting. This agenda has a lot of items on it and promises to be a lot of stuff going on. If you only watch one meeting, this monthly meeting is the one to pay attention to. The consent agenda consists of the first 19 items, but you can expect the commissioners to pull a few of those items for further discussion. On that list are things like granting CC&N’s for new telecommunications services, approvals of surcharges, and some net metering tariff adjustments. Items 20 through 29 are regular agenda items and contain some updates (EPCOR/Johnson Utilities), Rate modifications for various aspects of service (Arizona Water Company, APS, TEP) and some Commission related discussion topics such as electric disconnect rules, the PFAS water contamination issue in the west valley, rate case modifications for small utilities, and potential changes to the code of ethics.
It’s worth noting that most, of these items on the agenda have an opportunity for public comment. If you desire, please feel free to call in and express your opinions. The call information can be found on the agendas at the link below.
All of these agendas, times, and links to watch online can be found at www.azcc.gov/live.
Enjoy!