The New York State Public Service Commission on Oct. 17 expanded compensation eligibility for renewables hosted by customers of the New York Power Authority (NYPA) located in Consolidated Edison of New York Inc.’s service territory for excess electricity generated by eligible distributed energy resources (DER) projects.
This will allow NYPA’s customers to assist the furthering of the state’s renewable energy goals, the PSC noted in describing a related order that it issued.
NYPA’s New York City customers include a variety of public, non-profit and business customers such as the New York City government, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, hospitals, museums, and universities.
The PSC’s action will allow Con Edison to compensate NYPA customers who install on-site and remote net-metered DER projects making these projects more affordable.
According to NYPA, expanding “Value Stack” eligibility to NYPA customers will open up DER market potential in the Con Edison service territory that will help New York meet the goal of installing 6,000 megawatts of distributed solar by 2025, the PSC said.
“It will also present the DER developer community with additional business opportunities and further animate the DER markets in New York,” the Commission said. “This will be particularly beneficial to the development of renewable projects in New York City as many of NYPA’s customers have already declared their commitment to develop renewable energy projects.”
The PSC noted that New York’s energy supply has been going through significant changes since the Commission began implementing Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) strategy in 2014.
A central theme of REV is that renewable energy projects should be compensated based on where they are located on the grid and when they generate, thereby reducing cost shifting while still providing solid and reliable returns to DER projects.
Under the PSC’s Value Stack policy, certain local clean energy generation is compensated for the value it provides to the overall system. The compensation is in the form of bill credits to customers who also consume electricity.
The Commission had previously granted Value Stack compensation to Con Edison’s non-NYPA customers.
