Monthly Archives: September 2013

This commentary originally appeared on EDF’s California Dream 2.0 blog.

For over two years, EDF has been working to establish an On-Bill Repayment program in California that would allow property owners to finance energy efficiency or renewable generation projects and repay the obligation through their utility bill.  Since utility bills tend to get paid and the obligation could ‘run with the meter’, defaults are expected to be low, which will improve the availability and reduce the cost of financing.  In May 2012, the California Public Utilities Commission (“CPUC”) agreed with our position and ordered the large utilities in California to develop a program for commercial properties.  EDF estimates that this program could generate $5B of investment over 12 years, which is expected to support 36,000 jobs.

Unfortunately, we are still waiting for the nonresidential OBR pilot in California to be implemented and if the utilities get their way, we may be waiting for close to another full year.  The California utilities appear to be fearful of change, distributed generation, and the impact of reduced demand.  They have employed aggressive tactics with teams of lawyers arguing and re-arguing every potential issue, even after the issues have presumably been settled by the CPUC.

This stands in sharp contrast to what is happening in Hawaii.  On March 25, the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission (“HPUC”) ordered the primary Hawaii utility, Hawaiian Electric Company, (“HECO”) to establish an OBR program for residential and commercial customers.  I just returned from 3 days in Honolulu and it appears that they are working cooperatively to get the program running in the first quarter of 2014.  This timetable of 12 months from HPUC order to implementation is less than half of what we seem to need in California, despite the fact that the Hawaii program covers a much broader range of property types and relies on public as well as private sources of financing.

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