“AI can enhance optimizing water treatment, monitoring system performance, and improving customer engagement. For instance, early warnings could be established to flag affordability challenges of high-risk customers, thereby spotting trends before they are shut off.”

“New strategies are emerging that provide temporary or long-term pathways for DERs to avoid grid constraints that can lead to costly and time-intensive utility infrastructure upgrades. These strategies typically fall under the banner of flexible interconnection or flexible connection.”

“What is often missing is not data, but memory. Utilities generate enormous amounts of operational information during major events, yet much of the reasoning behind decisions on what was tried, what worked, and what failed, fades quickly once the event passes.”

“Efficiency and customer experience benefits are hard to quantify, and regulators are increasingly wary of qualitative arguments as affordability becomes a dominant concern.”

“Until a solution is determined and implemented, dramatically increasing demand leads to dramatically increasing whole­sale prices for capacity, energy, and transmission, which is generally passed through to retail customers.”

“How much remaining stored energy is available at any moment – known as State of Charge (SoC) – is not transparent to grid operators and planners. Achieving greater visibility into SoC is an overlooked means to unlock greater capacity and reliability for the grid at lower cost.”

“If the FCC were to grant NextNav preemptive rights to the 900 MHz spectrum, the resulting need to revert to manual meter reading, coupled with subsequent deployment of replacement solutions, could increase costs for ratepayers by an estimated $100 billion.”

“By severing the traditional safeguards for reasonable system growth, these policies create inappropriate cross subsidies and erode one of the core mechanisms through which utility rates have historically been kept affordable.”

“At WECC, we don’t take an opinion on the best technology or resource to use for generating electricity or any economic or environmental aspect. Our focus is to make sure the West has electricity at all hours of the day and night now and into the future, and that the grid remains stable.”

“Our tariffs are designed to allow certain carbon-free or renewable programs to be funded to serve large load customers but designed to ensure that residential or commercial customers are held harmless in terms of the costs of those programs.”