California Reliability Authority.

Existing law, enacted during the 2000–01 energy crisis, creates the California Consumer Power and Conservation Financing Authority, with prescribed powers and responsibilities, for the purpose of issuing revenue bonds for the purposes of supplementing public and private power supplies and ensuring a sufficient and reliable supply of electricity. The financing authority is also authorized to finance incentives for investment in cost-effective, energy-efficient appliances and energy demand reduction, to achieve an adequate energy capacity reserve level, and to provide financing for the retrofit of inefficient electrical powerplants. Existing law prohibits the financing authority from approving any new program, enterprise, or project on or after January 1, 2007, unless authority to approve such an activity is granted by statute enacted on or before January 1, 2007. Until January 1, 2007, the financing authority was authorized to request proposals from qualified participating parties to purchase, lease, or otherwise acquire sites for the purpose of developing generation facilities that would provide the lowest cost electricity to consumers over the life of the facilities. This bill would establish the California Reliability Authority, a nonprofit public benefit corporation, and would, beginning January 1, 2022, require the authority, subject to the Public Utilities Commission's oversight, to procure, through a competitive solicitation process, adequate resource capacity to meet the annual and monthly resource adequacy needs of customer load in the service territories of the electrical corporations, determined as specified. The bill would require the authority, in exercising its procurement authority, to achieve certain objectives. The bill would require the Public Utilities Commission, in coordination with the State Energy Resources Conservation and Development Commission, by June 1, 2021, to adopt selection criteria for use by the authority in selecting resources for procurement to minimize costs and to achieve those objectives. The bill would require the Public Utilities Commission to take certain actions, including the establishment of protocols for the authority's competitive solicitation process for the procurement of adequate resource capacity and the development of a methodology to allocate costs incurred by the authority in the procurement of that capacity. The bill would specify that costs incurred by the authority are to be recovered through direct billing to electrical corporations, electric service providers, and community choice aggregators, as provided. The bill would provide that the organization and operation of the California Reliability Authority is overseen by an oversight board consisting of 5 members appointed by the Governor who have expertise in electrical reliability. The bill would specify that the members of the oversight board serve a 3-year term and may be reappointed by the Governor.