EDCs back price-cap stability for Year 7 shared clean energy program, propose ending cash-out of subscriber credits

United Illuminating and Eversource told a Public Utilities Regulatory Authority technical meeting that they want to keep the same price-cap setting method and most bid preferences for the Shared Clean Energy Facility program’s seventh year and proposed removing the program’s cash-out option for subscriber on-bill credits to avoid inadvertent payments to former account holders.

At the meeting, held as part of docket 250804, John King of United Illuminating summarized the utilities’ recommendations, saying the EDCs support “using the same price cap setting methodology as described in the year 6 SCAP final program decision” and urged continuing a single price cap for most project types while allowing carport canopy projects to bid above the standard cap as they have in prior years.

The utilities told authority staff they favor keeping the bid-preference categories and amounts established in the year 6 decision, arguing that “revisiting and potentially revising the bid preferences annually is counterproductive to program stability” and that consistent rules are needed to collect comparable data across program years.

The utilities also proposed two programmatic rule changes. Eversource’s Isabel Hazelwood said the company wants to remove a provision that allows subscribers to cash out their on-bill STEP credits at account termination or annually, describing the change as a clarification to align the program with its intent to reduce customer bills. Hazelwood said Eversource has not had customers specifically request a cash-out of an SCF credit but has seen a handful of cases where billing timing caused a credit to be applied after a customer left the property. She said the issue has affected fewer than five permanently closed accounts in Eversource’s portfolio and that automating a billing fix would be costly, while simply changing the program language to bar cash-outs would not have an implementation cost.

Katarina Miller, speaking for the EDCs, told staff that the utilities have noted proposed federal changes to investment tax credits but that developers, not the utilities, are likely to be best positioned to quantify how those changes would affect project economics. “The best parties to answer that would be probably, the developers because that those will have the most information how much these ITCs will impact the development of the projects and their feasibility,” she said. The EDCs also said they will file price-cap analyses that were due the following day.

Authority staff asked whether allowing cash payments could affect low-income participants’ eligibility for other benefits. Hazelwood said yes, that converting an on-bill credit to cash could be counted as income and might affect eligibility for other programs, and noted that roughly 90% of currently enrolled customers in Eversource’s SCF portfolio are low-income.

On siting rules, staff asked whether the program’s limit — that most project sites use no more than 10% of land with slopes greater than 15% and prohibit grading to meet that limit — remains necessary given construction-stormwater-general-permit oversight. The utilities deferred to the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) for slope determinations and said they do not have data showing whether the slope requirement has hindered participation.

A representative of the Office of Consumer Counsel, Kim White, asked for clarification about whether any active customers have requested cash-outs; Hazelwood responded that active customers have not requested cash-outs but that billing-timing issues at account closure have implicated the provision in a few cases. White also asked whether changing billing automation would be costly; Hazelwood said automating the reversal of credits would be costly, but deleting the cash-out language from program terms would not.

No formal votes took place during the technical meeting. Authority staff closed by reminding stakeholders that written comments on the Year 7 proposals are due October 2 and that the utilities’ price-cap filings were due the following day. The meeting record then closed and the session was adjourned.