The Joint IOUs want all grandfathering abolished... but I suspect even the CPUC wouldn't be that evil. The public comments and submissions from the "independent stakeholders" was completed on September 24. Now the CPUC will deliberate (back in the good old days, this would be the period that most juicy bribes and other facilitation fees would be spent to buy favors) on the various input and should have a decision by the end of the year.
I know the cards are all in the utilities' favor since sentiment has shifted in recent months into a world where decentralized residential solar was just a benefit being reaped by wealthy Californians. And the efforts to demonize residential solar actually had a lot of traction. From the numbers, it's clear that the median household income for solar customers is higher than that of an average homeowner. Plus PG&E's costs have gone up dramatically while solar-customers had their NBCs and other costs frozen. This logically means a smaller population of non-solar customers has to bear the massive increases driven by PG&E's own mismanagement.
But rather than blame themselves for sucking, PG&E blames solar customers for shorting the poor. Easiest form of deflection and it's working. And California policymakers tend to side with the PoCo's argument. There's a lot of influence coming from all the stakeholders that waste all the money PG&E gets authorized to spend.
On the other hand, Sunrun, Semper, Enphase, SunPower, etc aren't contributing nearly as money on their end. And existing solar customers sure aren't sending kickbacks and facilitation fees to all the interests to the CPUC member's investments and friends. The wisest player in this is Tesla; who has been absent from the NEM debate. They have made no cases and sided with no one. Because they know if NEM 3.0 comes out and screws residential solar, it will be a boon for their ESS business. And if residential solar wins, then they're already an established player in the solar game and will ride the hand they are dealt. They are playing the arms dealer role and will win no matter what.
Almost every thinktank and "independent" analysis of California's NEM 1.0 and NEM 2.0 find in favor of PG&E. Look at this simple chart from Verdant Associates. They basically show how NEM solar customers are shorting the utilities almost $1Bn. The CPUC can't keep ignoring these "facts". At this point the CPUC's more concerned with how/when to blow up residential solar. The utilities have already wont he argument that California residential solar is crushing poor people who cannot afford the solar. And now the utilities want solar blown up tomorrow with all grandfathering abolished. While CalSSA wants it blown up later. They stopped deliberating whether residential is good for California a while back.
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