Wheeling of
Electricity
Wheeling "is the movement of
electricity, owned by a power supplier and sold to a retail consumer,
over transmission and distribution lines owned by neither one." A fee
is charged by the owners of the lines for letting others use them.
(www.cepc.net/rewhl.htm)
Wheeling is defined as
''the process of transmitting electric power from a seller's point of
generation across a third-party-owned transmission and distribution
system to the seller's retail customer.'' (Hawaii PUC)
Intragovernmental Wheeling
means that the producer of the energy is a consortium or partnership
between renewable energy producer(s) and government(s) and the buyer is
a governmental agency.
The Hawaii PUC has opened a docket on Intragovernmental Wheeling. The
PUC Order dated June 29, 2007 with five initial parties: four utilities
(KIUC, HECO, MECO & HELCO) and the Consumer Advocate (DCCA). The
Order asked for other interested entities to file motions to Intervene
as a party or participant. The deadline to file was July 19,
2007. DBEDT (Attorney Mark J Bennett). Herethen are those
accepted or requesting acceptance into the docket:
Utilities (4): KIUC; HECO; MECO; HELCO
Government (7): U.S. Navy; DBEDT; DCCA; Hawai`i County; Maui County;
Kaua`i County; City & County of Honolulu
Independent Power Producers (6): SunEdison; Puna Geothermal Ventures;
Castle & Cooke Resorts LLC; Lanai Sustainability Research
LLC; HREA; RealGreen Power LLC
Community (1): Life of the Land
Background. The Hawaii PUC
opened a docket in 1996 to examine competition within the Hawaii
electric utility industry (Docket No. 96-0493). Many of the issues in
that docket morphed into the Distributed Generation docket the PUC
opened in 2003 (Docket No. 03-0371). The Commission ruled in the DG
docket that the utility can do DG at utility substations, but
customer-sited DG should be installed by third parties. Life of
the Land was a party in dockets 96-0493 and 03-03671 where we advocated
for wheeling.