California Municipal Utilities Association (CMUA)
CMUA provides a historic perspective to understanding the relationship between publicly owned utilities (POU, municipal or MDL [municipal departing load]) and the IOUs and states that "[s]ince the beginning of the electric system in California, POUs and IOUs have been coexisting and competing-to some degree or another."20 Over time new POUs have been created, other times existing POUs annex and serve new territory-including territory once served by an IOU. CMUA continues on with a historical analysis to establish the principal that it is just common sense that an IOU would assume a certain amount of departing load would occur every year and the IOU would not procure for that portion of the load.
This is the crux of CMUA's position today: the IOUs should exclude MDL from their load forecasts, not incur costs for that load, and then the load that does depart should not be held responsible for costs associated with the IOU's procurement. Under any "fair share" analysis, if departing load has been excluded from procurement forecasts, there is no need for cost shifting to protect the IOUs' ratepayers, as the IOUs have not incurred costs on behalf of the departing load.
CMUA argues that both SCE and PG&E's witnesses testified that their respective utility did exclude historic levels of MDL. Therefore CMUA asks the Commission to make a finding that MDL was excluded from the forecasts. In addition, CMUA asks the Commission to order the IOUs to fully comply in the future with the requirements from AB 1723 and provide a discrete, explicit estimate of the amount of MDL excluded from their forecasts, and not just "implicitly" exclude the load.
20 CMUA Opening Brief, p. 5.
