RFP launched for California distributed solar, storage projects

The Bay Area Load Serving Entities (Community Choice Aggregators) including East Bay Community Energy (EBCE), Peninsula Clean Energy (PCE), Silicon Valley Clean Energy (SVCE) and Silicon Valley Power (SVP) (collectively the LSEs) are seeking proposals from qualified developers or vendors for a comprehensive offering to provide Resource Adequacy (RA) capacity and resilience to the LSEs’ residential and commercial customers through the development of customer-sited Distributed Energy Resources (DERs).

Through this solicitation, EBCE, SVCE, and PCE are seeking to procure a minimum of 10 MW each of RA capacity and SVP will be procuring 2.7 MW of RA capacity, proportional to its geography and customer account size relative to the other LSEs, for a total of approximately 32.7 MW.

Every LSE will partner with the relevant selected Proposer(s) to develop a program offering to LSEs’ customers to facilitate the development of projects to provide the desired RA capacity.

For each LSE, a minimum capacity will be sited on residential sites with the remaining to be installed on commercial or residential sites. A portion of the capacity shall be deployed by September 2020 with the remaining capacity targeted for deployment by either June 2021 or September 2021.

The LSE's have an extensive need for economically-viable RA, which they seek to address, at least partially, through DER aggregation mechanisms, such as Proxy Demand Response (PDR).

This solicitation is being issued by the LSEs in a joint manner, due to the alignment of purpose in responding to the PSPS and increasing community resilience. However, Proposers will submit a separate proposal to each LSE that they are interested in proposing to, but are not required to propose to each LSE, as detailed in the Submittal Requirements section.

Each LSE will evaluate proposals separately, with substantial communication occurring between LSEs to discuss proposed strategies and pricing. Each LSE will select and contract with winning Proposer(s) separately.

The bulk of this solicitation is the same for each LSE - differences between LSEs have been organized into tables throughout the solicitation to assist prospective Proposers in structuring their response to each LSE.

The deadline for the submission of the proposals is on December 23, 2019, with the target awarding of the contract by February 2020.