Voltus and the Mission:data Coalition last week filed a complaint with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) saying that utility data blocking is making it hard to develop virtual power plants within PJM.
Energy Changemakers described the data blocking problem last year in an article “Death by a Million Pdfs: Confusing and Inaccessible Data Delays Virtual Power Plants.”
The data comes from utility smart meters, which eight utilities in PJM spent $5.7 billion to install. Although utility ratepayers and federal taxpayers paid for the smart meters, “the cost-saving benefits to consumers have remained elusive,” according to the filing.
The smart meters are collecting the data, but the utilities are not presenting it to distributed energy companies in a “scalable, efficient, and meaningful” manner, according to the filing. Entities like Voltus use the data when forming virtual power plants. (Voltus leverages and aggregates home automation systems and devices to deliver demand response and ancillary services in the PJM region.)
The PJM utilities either do not provide bulk access to hourly interval meter data for thousands of residential customers or do so in a way that is “so impracticable as to in effect amount to an inability to obtain data,” says the filing.
The filing essentially argues that PJM requires virtual power plant operators to provide data that they cannot obtain from utilities. This makes the requirement discriminatory, giving utilities, which do have the data, a competitive advantage as they compete against virtual power plant providers.
Another virtual power plant provider, CPower, tried to bring the problem to the attention of FERC in 2023. However, the commission denied the petition last year due to a lack of evidence.
So Voltus and Mission-data focused on documenting what they described as “widespread practices of data blocking” at the eight utilities. For example, they allege that:
- PECO and PEPCO will not provide interval usage data, peak load contribution values, or capacity and energy loss factor values to distributed energy companies, even when the customer consented.
- Commonwealth Edison limits data requests to 10 accounts at a time and does not provide name, address, account number, or other information necessary to tie a particular customer to usage data.
- AEP Ohio and Appalachian Power only provide 12 months of interval data for individual customers over email, charge $50 per request, and require a 2-4 week turnaround.
“Today’s complaint should be a wake-up call to state regulators that they cannot wait any longer to mandate data portability,” said Michael Murray, president of the Mission:data Coalition, which advocates for customer-friendly energy data access policies. “By depriving virtual power plants of the data needed to operate, utilities undermine competition and contribute to today’s affordability crisis.”
The filing is available here.