There's an unfolding conflict between the land's investor-endemic utilities and distributed energy resources providers in California that highlights the complexities of sharing utility information with the broader world.

Concluding month, we introduced our GTM Squared readers to the strange instance of California's disappearing Integrated Capacity Analysis maps. In uncomplicated terms, the conflict can be summed upwardly this way: Utilities restricted access to long-available data on disquisitional infrastructure security grounds, DER advocates protested, and state regulators accept at present told utilities to restore the information they took away.

That's the upshot of a Tuesday ruling (PDF) from California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) administrative law judge Robert Stonemason, ordering Pacific Gas & Electrical, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric to reopen their Renewable Sale Mechanism maps inside the next 5 days.

Since 2016, these online portals have shared utilities' increasingly detailed data on DER hosting capacity across their thousands of distribution grid circuits (i.east., their Integrated Chapters Analysis, or ICA, maps) equally part of fulfilling their mandate under the CPUC's distribution resource plan proceeding. Although they're limited in their accuracy, they've become an important tool for developers of solar, energy storage and other distribution grid-connected DER projects to avoid interconnection constraints and target loftier-value areas.

But in early September, all iii utilities abruptly shut downward access to anyone who lacked a CPUC judge's social club granting them usage rights — a motion that drew immediate fire from DER developers and stakeholders.

Utilities claimed they were forced into this movement by a July 24 ruling (PDF) from law judge Stonemason, dealing with confidential handling and redaction of distribution system planning data, specifically data that could be used by bad actors to identify critical filigree infrastructure. Because the utilities had missed a September 1 borderline for resolving these issues, they contended, they had no choice but to restrict access until that work was consummate.

Merely Mason'southward 5-page gild this week makes short work of this argument: the investor-endemic utilities, or IOUs, "should not accept taken the PV Renewable Auction Machinery maps down from public view and and so shifted them to a confidential portal, every bit my July 24, 2018 ruling did not give the IOUs the authority to countermand a prior Commission conclusion that the PV RAM maps be made public," he wrote.

"Within v days from the date of this ruling, the IOUs shall brand the PV RAM maps publicly available, as they did before, in conformity with D.ten-12-048 and Resolution Due east-4414," he continued.

Stonemason noted that his July ruling "did not address, nor could information technology reverse, a resolution that the Commissioners adopted." But he also noted that its guidance on the issue of redacting disquisitional infrastructure data "addressed upcoming, rather than existing, maps."

That'due south considering the ruling was tied non to the existing "ICA 1.0" data, which has been available via the RAM maps since 2016, but to the much more than detailed and useful "ICA 2.0" information prepare to be rolled out by the utilities by the end of 2018.

Today'southward ICA 1.0 maps use years-old data based on snapshots of total minimum and maximum load, and methodologies that take had to exist adapted for better accuracy since they were offset rolled out in 2016. That's made them useful mainly as a rough guide for fugitive red parts of the map, which indicate a lack of hosting capacity, Tim McDuffie, engineering science director for California solar and energy services developer CalCom Free energy, told GTM concluding month.

The ICA 2.0 maps are congenital on new models and more than robust technology, and will include detailed, 576-hr power flow modeling down to every circuit, line section, and node on the filigree, with monthly updates to proceed it accurate enough to play a role in the land's Rule 21 interconnection processes, according to Sahm White, policy and economical assay manager for the Clean Coalition.

This level of detail should add significant efficiencies to the process of applying for and receiving approval for new projects, he said. They're besides congenital on the same data that's informing the utilities' Locational Net Benefits Analysis and the Distribution Deferral Opportunity Reports, which stand for a beginning step into contracting for DER not-wires alternatives for the distribution grids.

That makes these maps a central tool for all the non-utility actors seeking to take office in the land'southward push button to integrate DERs at every level of grid and energy planning, White noted. Like tools are being adult in New York and Hawaii, the other states moving along a like path.

Still, utilities are responsible for maintaining the security of this data, which can reveal market place-sensitive information about big free energy customers, or potentially inform physical or cyberattacks on the filigree. And the broader upshot of what information can justifiably be redacted to prevent those risks remains to be resolved by an extended Dec. 31 deadline.