SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A representative of one of the staunchest opponents of past efforts to transform CAISO into an RTO said his labor union plans to sponsor the California legislation needed to implement the “Step 2” proposal of the West-Wide Governance Pathways Initiative.

On top of that, another previous objector to CAISO “regionalization” — a coalition of California’s publicly owned utilities — signaled it might sign on as co-sponsor.

“I am very happy to say that we will be sponsoring the bill in the next California legislative session to implement the Pathways proposal for the CAISO and for the California utilities,” Marc Joseph, an attorney representing the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), said Oct. 30 during a panel discussion at the CAISO Stakeholder Symposium in Sacramento.

Joseph noted he’d sat on the stage at the same CAISO event eight years earlier to voice concern about the first of three attempts to regionalize the ISO through bills that would’ve transformed the California grid operator into an independent entity by eliminating the state’s role in appointing its Board of Governors.

“This would mean that all of the functions of the CAISO would be removed from California control with no idea what would happen to them, and no chance for California to go back if we didn’t like the outcome,” Joseph said. “The legislature was in effect being asked to mortgage the farm with nothing more than ‘trust us’ as collateral.”

That approach was “a particular problem” for California labor groups because the state’s renewable portfolio standard (RPS) is “anchored” in the CAISO balancing authority area, requiring that a certain portion of new renewables be built in-state and directly interconnected to that BAA.

“If the CAISO became the RTO for the West, that could mean that the balancing authority area would be the entire West, and that would mean that the RPS structure would effectively be meaningless and most of the jobs for people in California would probably be exported to other states,” Joseph said.

The Pathways proposal is different, he said, because it proposes to create a new independent “regional organization” to govern rules for CAISO’s Western Energy Imbalance Market (WEIM) and Extended Day-Ahead Market (EDAM) while leaving the ISO’s BAA intact, a point Joseph and other labor representatives have emphasized previously, including in front of California lawmakers. (See Pathways Initiative Releases ‘Step 2’ Proposal for Western ‘RO’ and California Labor Groups Affirm Support for Pathways Proposal.)

Heading off questions about the bill’s legislative author and its specific language, Joseph jokingly said: “Cool your jets. This is still October. It’s only been 30 days since the governor finished signing the bills from the last legislative session. We are ahead of schedule, and we’ll get to all of those things in due time.”

‘This is for Real’

When Joseph told Randy Howard, general manager of the Northern California Power Agency (NCPA), that IBEW planned to sponsor the Pathways bill, Howard said his first question was, “Who’s the author?”

“And I said, ‘I think we’d be interested in co-sponsoring,’ which is a big shift for us in public power,” Howard said during the same panel.

NCPA represents 16 publicly owned utilities (POUs) in California, which are responsible for scheduling about 12% of the energy delivered into CAISO. Howard said public power’s position on previous CAISO regionalization efforts largely aligned with that of labor.

“When we’ve looked at previous proposals related to an RTO — and the legislation, similar to [Joseph], we saw many more risks than we could identify benefits. And again, once you hand over the keys to the organization, you couldn’t take them back,” he said.

Howard said that, for public power, years of regional collaboration through CAISO’s WEIM eased utilities’ distrust stemming from the Western energy crisis of 2000/01. NCPA members prefer an “incremental” approach to developing a Western market, which the Pathways proposal continues to accommodate, he said.

As nonprofits, Howard said POUs are concerned primarily about maintaining reliability while keeping costs down. And while the publics would like to own all of their resources, that’s not practical, he said, and participation in a broader day-ahead market like EDAM would provide access to a greater pool of resources at a lower cost.

“And by having this more efficient market and the market platform, we should be able to continue to add these emission-free resources and do it in a way that we can share them across the West with each other, diversify greater and try to keep the rates more affordable for our ratepayers, because that’s what we think is the most important thing,” Howard said.

Panel moderator Kathleen Staks, executive director of Western Freedom and co-chair of the Pathways Launch Committee, remarked about the progress the initiative has made in the year since it was formally launched.

“I think it has really sort of sunk in for us, [and] for the audiences that we’ve been talking with, that this is very real. This is a real proposal, and now we’ve just made it even more real,” Staks said.

Speaking a week earlier on a panel at the fall joint meeting of the Committee on Regional Electric Power Cooperation and Western Interconnection Regional Advisory Body (CREPC-WIRAB), Staks said she was “cautiously optimistic” about passage of the Pathways bill.

Reached for comment on the floor of the symposium, Joseph told RTO Insider he sees “nothing uniquely challenging” about passing the Pathways bill compared with “any other substantial bill.”

“In fact, because there is such widespread support for it, I think there’s every reason for it to be successful,” he said. “The single most important fact is that the leading opponents to prior rounds — labor and POUs — are now potentially sponsoring,” he said.

Joseph confirmed the legislation will be introduced during the next legislative session, which begins in January.

And he reiterated the point made by Staks.

“The level of engagement is an indication that everybody recognizes this is for real.”