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Garen Checkley's avatar

Would you consider this a good decision? Seems so… right?

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Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart's avatar

It's a pretty good one. I'm a tad skeptical about why the IOUs cannot report on the max power consumption on 15 minutes. It seems a straight-forward computation. Either their IT systems are *really* crappy or there is something I don't understand, so I am going to try to unravel that part. If I do, I'll report back because it seems an easy, contained, question.

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Garen Checkley's avatar

Yeah - my assumption has always been that they function a bit like a government department with minimal in-house technical staff. Something like this should be a couple weeks of work max for a few people to build/test/launch a feature, but instead has a contract negotiation, vendor outsourcing agreements, has to get behind other vendor projects, etc

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Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart's avatar

Check out my writeup about PG&E's request for their "New Billing System". It is written in Cobol and they want us, the ratepayers, to fork $760M to rewrite it. It's maddening, except that it is a big blocker to affordability and dealing with our energy transition.

https://pelegri.substack.com/p/that-pg-and-e-meter-to-cash-system

On top of the PG&E behavior, the CPUC rules in proceedings get in the way. The more I learn about how everything works, the more I understand how hard it is to get the right outcome. It is not the fault of the CPUC staff..

Depending on the moment I am tempted to start an LLC and become a participant in these proceedings. It would be a lot of work and frustration but it is tempting.

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Garen Checkley's avatar

Maddening!

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