Relief Requested
On August 26, 2004, the National Submetering and Utility Allocation Association (Association) filed this petition for rulemaking requesting that the Commission open a rulemaking to consider rule changes to permit owners of existing master-metered multi-unit residential buildings to submeter electricity and natural gas service to individual tenants. Although the petition was filed as a petition for rulemaking, the Association noted that were it not for the age of the decisions for which it was seeking clarification, it would have filed a petition for modification.
The petition identifies two types of buildings that could fall into this category, multi-unit residential buildings constructed before December 1981 and buildings constructed at any point in time for a commercial purpose that have since been converted into a multi-unit residential purpose. The petition also requests that the Commission consider allowing building owners/operators to submeter service to non-residential customers but does not pursue this second request in significant detail. Because of the lack of development of this issue by petitioner, we deny the request to open a rulemaking on the commercial property issue and focus solely on the issue of submetering as it relates to existing multi-unit residential buildings.2
2 On March 17, 2005, the Building Owners and Managers Associations of San Francisco and California (collectively, BOMA) filed a petition to intervene to address solely the question of allowing submetering in commercial buildings. Because of the requirement to act upon a petition for rulemaking within six months of filing, and the lack of development of this aspect of the petition, we deny the petition to intervene but invite BOMA, or any other interested party, to file a petition for rulemaking, if it so desires, to pursue this topic. In such case, the party should identify the rules that it seeks to change, and specific language to implement the changes it seeks.
