By Rory Sweeney

AUSTIN, Texas — ERCOT’s Technical Advisory Committee last week continued the debate over who should be responsible for Texas’ largely unused smart meter monitoring  website.

The website, which allows authorized parties to access individual consumers’ electricity-usage data, has been operated from its inception by Smart Meter Texas (SMT), an entity created by a coalition of transmission and distribution utilities. For the past two years, the state Public Utility Commission has been considering whether to transfer oversight of the website to ERCOT. The coalition, along with several other industry and advocacy groups, has supported the move. The ISO, with support from the state Office of Public Utility Counsel, has resisted the responsibility, citing technical and financial hurdles.

At the TAC meeting last week, the main concern was the potential impact on ERCOT’s budget and administrative fees.

TAC Chairman Randa Stephenson, of the Lower Colorado River Authority, asked for a synopsis from an ERCOT workshop earlier in the week that had focused on the potential transition. Mark Ruane, ERCOT’s director of settlements, retail and credit, explained that the PUC has been looking at data-flow projections if the ISO were to take over the website. Attendees at an April PUC meeting agreed to a “high-level” concept, he said, in which ERCOT would provide settlement data to the web portal rather than take control of the portal itself.

Cost Information Sought

The goal of last week’s workshop was to decide the scope of the project. Attendees left saying they needed more information on the likely costs versus the potential benefits. The PUC plans to take up this issue again at its June 9 meeting.

CenterPoint Energy’s Kathy Scott, chair of the Retail Marketing Subcommittee, said that the subcommittee has asked competitive retailers to detail what functionality they’d want to see from both ERCOT and SMT if the ISO takes over operation of the web portal. CenterPoint is one of the utilities that runs SMT. She said committee members and the competitive retailers will meet after the June PUC meeting to determine how to move forward.

Stephenson asked that updates to the process be included in future RMS reports.

Eric Goff, of Citigroup Energy, noted that SMT is funded through rate surcharges and asked whether there are legal mechanisms to direct some of that funding to ERCOT for taking on the responsibility.

Scott said it’s likely within the PUC’s purview to decide on the allocation.

Website Usage Low

Perhaps a larger question is what should be done with the website. Scott highlighted statistics showing that the site has about 68,000 registered users. That equals a little less than 1% of the more than 7 million customers who have smart meters installed and could be using the site.

Additionally, according to a 2014 report by the South-central Partnership for Energy Efficiency as a Resource (SPEER), it’s just 8,000 more users than the site had two years ago.

Connecting to the website is supposed to enhance the usefulness of energy-saving “home area network” (HAN) devices, but the statistics showed that consumers who purchase them aren’t continuing to use them. While the 2014 SPEER report noted 12,000 HAN devices being used throughout ERCOT’s territory, Scott reported last week that only about 9,700 were still in use as of March.

Concerns have also been raised about SMT’s privacy and data protection. At May’s RMS meeting, representatives of consumers and several investor-owned utilities abstained from voting on two measures that would allow using SMT to submit information from small generation sources, such as rooftop solar arrays. The IOUs questioned whether providing generation data violated customers’ privacy.

Quicker Processing

The TAC also voted to endorse retail market guide revision request (RMGRR) 136, which is meant to help the market process documents quicker by clarifying the procedures for removing holds on switching customers’ retail providers. Holds can occur when a customer has an outstanding balance or the provider believes the meter has been tampered with.

The TAC also endorsed RMGRR 137, which would create a timeline for correcting inaccurate customer billing information.

Additionally, the final review has been performed for system change request 786, which sets “retail testing environment” business requirements. ERCOT has assigned it project number 192-01.

Finally, Scott noted that a draft nodal protocol revision request (NPRR) is being developed that may replace RMGRR 132 or require it to be rewritten. With the help of Oncor’s Taylor Woodruff, Tom Burke of Amarillo-based Golden Spread Electric Cooperative will guide the new NPRR through the stakeholder process.