As you probably saw in the SJR on Thursday, city council approved CWLP's recommended PURPA ordinances this week. These cover how CWLP governs small generators that want to connect to its grid, how it will seek to improve how efficiently it generates electricity at the power plant, and how customers will be able to dial their meters backwards when they have small generation systems, like solar panels. These ordinances also set out how CWLP will seek to diversify its fuel sources as well as how it will approach smart metering/time of use rates for residential customers in the future.
Clean Energy Springfield worked hard to get CWLP to open up its alternatives more in creating these ordinances, and in part we succeeded. We, along with other individuals and organizations interested in creating a more sustainable future, were able to get some of the more egregious elements in CWLP's original proposals removed, such as a requirement that its net metering program get at least ten participants before starting and a hard limit as to the size of net metering generators (which would have excluded larger businesses).
We also got CWLP to agree to revisit smart metering for residential customers by 2010. While we continue to feel that smart metering is a viable option now, in discussions with CWLP we found that (1) they were not going to budge on that because (2) there are some legitimate issues they have to work out on their end. (Our sense is that these are not anywhere near the substantial kinds of obstacles that CWLP feels they are, but that's a much longer conversation than was possible under the PURPA timeline.)
Last, we got CWLP to agree to consider energy efficiency as a source of fuel diversity. This was a minor change, I think, but it gives us some room to argue more strongly for CWLP to develop programs that shift demand away from electricity use and toward not just traditional energy efficiency elements (like insulation or appliance upgrades) but also passive solar technologies, like solar water and air heaters. Moving CWLP away from its view of itself as first and foremost an electricity supplier is an important step in getting to green.