California Utilities Under Pressure to Come Clean, Quickly

(MoneyWatch)  It's not enough for Californian utilities like Pacific Gas & Electric of Southern California Edison to turn 20 percent of the state's electrical generation into renewables by the end of the year. Besides achieving that Herculean feat, they must also bow to the state's many demands on behalf of consumers.

Innovation and customer service are unusual assets for major utilities. Keep that in mind while looking over this short list of a few things now expected of California utilities:

• Incorporate an ever-increasing amount of solar power from homes and businesses across the state
• Figure out by 2011 how to send information from smart meters to consumers and third parties
• Quickly put consumer fears about smart meters to rest
• Satisfy both environmentalists and local communities when building clean energy mega-projects

The details of the list above are changing quickly. When utilities buy solar power from home owners, for instance, it's called "net metering". Responding to the explosion of interest in solar power, the California state assembly voted Thursday to double the net metering cap to 5 percent of peak electricity demand. A decade ago, this issue wasn't even on the horizon.

On the second item, Earth2Tech has a smart post up about the expectation that utilities will free their customer data in under a year. And the pressure on smart meters isn't just from lawmakers.

Google, for instance, has a product called PowerMeter that requires utility info to run, and it's agitating for data. And judging from the more recent comments on my months-old post about PG&E's trouble convincing customers that their smart meters are accurate, distrust over the newfangled devices is becoming more intense, not less.

For those of us that don't work for or invest in utilities, all of the above is mostly good news. The rapidly shifting landscape will produce stronger companies in the end, and a roadmap for utilities in other states.

But will PG&E, SCE and their smaller peers meet all their deadlines? Probably not. PG&E, for one, is still planning a pilot program involving only a portion of its customers for 2011, and failed to secure funding even for that test.

PG&E is also expected to miss its end-of-year deadline for 20 percent renewables. The penalties for failure won't be high -- this time. There's much more to come, though. It's a new dawn for the utility industry, and only the nimble are likely to survive unscathed.

[Image credit: swanksalot / flickr]