First appointed to the D.C. Public Service Commission in 2021, Emile C. Thompson was confirmed by the D.C. Council as the panel’s chairman on June 7 for a term ending June 30, 2026. Earlier some council members had questioned whether Thompson met its requirement that the next person appointed to the PSC have “experience in electric grid modernization and renewable energy integration or technology.”
Thompson addressed that concern and talked about his vision for reaching the district’s goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2032 in an interview July 13 with NetZero Insider reporter Martin Berman-Gorvine. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Q. What are your priorities for the PSC?
Externally, making sure we meet our mandate of providing safe, reliable, affordable service to our ratepayers, while also meeting the District’s clean energy commitments. I don’t look at these as independent of each other. And we’ve started to move in that direction. One good example is our Pepco rate case, in which we approved a modest increase for residential ratepayers but also put into effect many performance-tracking mechanisms that include climate and energy goals that we hope will become fully operational in the future and will help the District in achieving our clean energy commitments. We’re also going to continue to prioritize grid modernization and the proliferation of solar around the District. Internally, it’s about improving employee retention and satisfaction.
Q. What are the biggest obstacles to reaching DC’s climate goals? (a) Cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half, District-wide, by 2032, and going carbon-neutral by 2050; and (b) 100% of electricity from renewable sources by 2032.
Looking at those two goals, we really think of collaboration and innovation. Collaboration, because these are not goals that solely rest on the commission action. For example, in D.C., roughly 23% of our greenhouse gas emission comes from vehicles, so we have to work with District agencies on how we’re going to look at the conversion of vehicles: gasoline and diesel-powered to EVs. Also, we have to look at our building codes and see how we can improve those. So that’s DCRA [the District’s Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs].
And then, of course, innovation, because we don’t yet have all the tools in our toolkit to reach our goals. As new technologies develop and become more cost effective, it will make our 2032 goal and our 2050 goal both more attainable and not have a huge cost burden on our residents.
Q. What is your response to concerns that you lack “experience in electric grid modernization and renewable energy integration or technology,” as required by the DC Council? What are you bringing to your new job from your previous roles as an assistant United States attorney and board member of DC Water?
Out of law school, I clerked for a judge, and that really gave me the background into how one thinks in this type of position, because we are a quasi-judicial body — we issue orders that are based on our opinions. I would also add that my undergraduate degree was in computer science, and I had a math and biology minor. So, this allows me to get down into the weeds, and I actually enjoy the numbers and some of the technical aspects.
I worked in city government for a number of years. That really taught me about collaboration and bringing parties to the table to reach a common goal and consensus. I then went to the U.S. Attorney’s office, and from there, I’m taking two main skills. One, the ability to delve into a subject deeply and substantively and become a subject matter expert; it also taught me to have a critical eye to what’s being presented to me. My time at DC Water was critical because DC Water really is on the forefront, especially with respect to renewable energy integration. On their campus, they have solar arrays; they have a geothermal heating and cooling system that powers the entire building. The big word there was innovation, especially when it came to renewable, resiliency in terms of how you respond to and plan for weather events like 100-year storms and 500-year storms that are becoming much more prevalent.
At the commission, I’m gaining grid modernization experience through on-the-job training and prior experience.
Q. What is your response to Nicole Rentz, Chesapeake Solar & Storage Association, who said solar developers are “facing arbitrary cost delays, barriers and inefficiencies imposed” by Pepco? She also cited a recent complaint filed with the PSC against Pepco for allegedly mishandling billing on community solar projects.
This is an allegation that I and Commissioner Beverly took very seriously. We studied the complaint, the response from Pepco, and the comments from the other parties involved, and we opened an investigation immediately. We are in the process right now of compiling an RFP for an audit into Pepco’s practices. [See DC PSC order issued June 30 in Case 1171.]
In Pepco’s response, they didn’t necessarily deny the allegations. What a lot of their response centered around was that the rules didn’t necessarily call for what the complaint alleged [they hadn’t done]. We are asking the parties to submit additional comments to see if there’s certain things the commission needs to do to make the process more transparent, to make the process easier, etc. The CREF [community renewable energy facilities] program provides a lot of the benefits of solar to our low-income residents, and we want to make sure everybody has the opportunity to take part in and benefit from this program and receive the credits that they signed up for.
Q. What is the role of natural gas in DC’s future? Do you support the Washington Gas 30-year project to replace gas pipes for a total cost of as much as $3 to $4.5 billion? Do you worry these could become stranded assets, given the city’s 2050 goal of carbon neutrality?
That’s the million-dollar question. That’s why the Commission opened Case 1167, our climate business plan case where we required Washington Gas and Pepco to file 30-year plans to explore what that road map looks like for carbon neutrality in 2050. As part of that, we’re going to be exploring many of the long-term assumptions that Washington Gas asserts and is trying to implement. People talk a lot about Washington Gas’s 30-year plan to replace the pipes. We have taken a very, very, very incremental approach to PROJECTpipes [the utility’s 40-year pipeline replacement program, which began in 2014 and completed its first phase in September 2019.] We require Washington Gas to file plans to replace pipes, and after every round of pipe replacement, we’re conducting audits and doing our due diligence to make sure we aren’t just replacing every pipe — we’re replacing only those that cause gas leaks and greenhouse gas emissions and explosions.
As we develop more of the Climate Business Plan, and we see the direction the District as a whole is moving to achieve these goals, that will continue to inform the direction we move with Washington Gas. In PROJECTpipes 2, we approved $150 million, which is a huge amount, but far less than $3 billion.
Q. How do you plan to address the interconnection issue for solar and wind power?
We’ve done a lot there. We look at interconnection in two ways: We look at it locally, and we look at it on the PJM level. PJM is doing this big interconnection reform in which they’re trying to reduce the backlog. [See
PJM Challenged on Interconnection Rule Transition.] A lot of that is caused by big projects going on the grid. And that has huge implications for us, because we don’t have any traditional generation within our boundaries. We rely on the PJM grid at large for a lot of our power.
[At the local DC level], we have established a cost-sharing program to reduce the burden of distribution upgrades when we do CREF projects. We have an issue with hosting capacity on a lot of our feeders, and so sometimes when you put on these larger CREF projects, it causes the hosting capacity to be exceeded, which requires the distribution upgrades. And so instead of having the developer of that CREF pay that money in full, we’ve developed a cost-sharing mechanism. It’s a 50K cap per project; PEPCO pays a part of it, and the developer pays a part of it.
Next, we’ve established a public interconnection queue so people can go into it and look for where their project is. So there’s more transparency there. We also, this past January, established a similar cost-sharing mechanism for net metering projects because we were running into the same hosting capacity issue with some homeowners who wanted to get solar in their house. There were large distribution upgrading costs. And so we put a rulemaking out, and we received comments. The commission is currently evaluating them and trying to determine the best way to go.
We are having more solar coming online than we ever had. Last year, 2021, was the first year that hit our solar carve-out, as required by the RPS statute, and so we’re very proud of that. This year we’re on track to outpace the number of applications we had next year. Yes, there are opportunities for improvement, but we’re adding solar in the District at a high number, and we’re very proud of that,
Q. From the PSC’s annual report on the Renewable Portfolio Standard, it looks as if what’s happening is that the utilities are meeting annual goals by buying renewable energy credits, not putting new clean generation on their systems. So how do you want to address this situation wherein D.C. ratepayers are not getting more clean energy but are paying for the RECs?
Wholesale electricity suppliers are the ones who are bound by the RPS, not the actual utilities. Pepco procures electricity through PJM auctions. But those wholesale providers are the ones who are responsible for ensuring that energy from renewable resources is in their bid.
The question really is, how do we encourage more renewable energy on the grid? I think we’re starting to see that in D.C. In our fuel mix versus the PJM fuel mix, we have 12% renewable energy, versus the PJM region, which is 6%. So we are better than the region. We are trying to be innovative in our approach. We have Pepco in the process of securing a long-term PPA. As the cost of solar is reduced, you’ll see more people buying solar energy. And as we make the procurement of renewable sources easy, you’ll see a lot of electricity suppliers do that. Right now, they do have the ability to just buy RECs. Some of it is just a financial proposition. Some of these things are controlled by market forces and things that we don’t have the power to require explicitly at this time.
Q. Why was there no substantive meeting in early July about encouraging Pepco and Washington Gas to apply for IIJA funds, report monthly to the PSC, and track their expenses? Are there plans for the commission to open its process and make it really public, transparent and engaging?
When we have our open meetings, the purpose of the open meeting, the majority of times unless stated otherwise, is to purely vote on matters before the commission. But we engage in a very, very robust stakeholder process. In the proceeding you mentioned, we told people two things. One, we want the utilities to file their plans with us, so that everybody can see them, so that there’s not this complaint later that Pepco and Washington Gas have filed their plan with the federal government that the commission didn’t know about, nor did the public. Once the plans are filed, we ask the public to comment. In the commission’s opinion, that’s the ideal transparency, because we’re making Pepco and Washington Gas come to the table and submit their programs. A lot of times in our other meetings, when we make orders, our orders will have the justifications for our reasoning, as well as the e-docket system that allows the public to go through and search anything they want with respect to any case. We very frequently grant intervenor status, so that parties that have an interest in the case can submit pleadings. We sometimes have open meetings hearing-style in which we allow public comment. The commission has, in my opinion, a very robust transparency process, to the point where some people complain it slows us down.
