Conforming with its historical practice, the Board has adopted a schedule for the submission and review of proposals for the Basic Generation Service (BGS) procurement process. The Board directed the electric utilities and invited other parties to file proposals by July 1, 2017, on the procurement of the remaining one-third BGS-RCSP (Residential and Small Commercial Pricing) requirements and the annual BGS-CIEP (Commercial and Industrial Energy Pricing) requirements for the period starting June 1, 2018. RECO was also directed to file a proposal for the procurement of BGS capacity and energy requirements for its non-PJM service area within New Jersey for the period starting June 1, 2018.

The preliminary schedule for the 2018 BGS proceeding is as follows:
BGS proposals - July 1, 2017
Discovery request deadline - July 24, 2017
Discovery response deadline - August 7, 2017
Legislative-type hearing - to be determined
Public hearings - to be determined
Final Comments - October 4, 2017
Board decision on BGS proposals - November 2017
Utility compliance filings - November/December 2017
Board decision on compliance filings - December 2017
Procurement process for BGS supply requirements - February 2018

The full text of the Order is available on the NEM Website.

The utilities, working with NYSERDA, developed a Utility Energy Registry (UER) as part of the Commission's REV initiative. The UER is an online platform intended to provide public access to community-scale utility energy demographics. The UER is intended to collect aggregated electricity and natural gas data, segmented by customer type and zip code, to support clean energy programs. Currently, the UER can accept and report the following data sets: aggregated monthly and annual customer counts and electric and gas consumption in MWhs and MMBTUs by revenue class definitions, and broken down by tax district, zip code and community boundaries using franchise tax identification numbers.

The Commission is requesting comment on whether the utilities should be required to populate and update the UER and what data should be included. Comments on whether the data sets should be changed or expanded and how the UER could be utilized to support particular purposes, such as Community Choice Aggregation, are requested as well.

Comments are due July 31, 2017. The full text of the Notice Requesting Comments is available on the NEM Website.

The Commission will convene Phase 2 of its PowerForward smart grid initiative on July 25-27, 2017, at its Columbus offices. Topics of discussion will include: Integration and Interoperability; Enabling Technologies for the Evolving Grid; Utility Perspectives; Integrating DER into the Evolving Grid; and Energy Storage. An Agenda Outline is available at this link.