WCEC and Vashon Climate Action Group challenged Puget Sound Energy’s Customer Benefit Indicator (CBI) methodology in its Draft Clean Energy Implementation Plan. The filing demonstrates how scoring choices systematically eliminate substation batteries from PSE’s preferred portfolio despite the company actively touting a similar battery installation in a Bainbridge substation.
- PSE’s three-point CBI scoring scale (0, 1, 2) obliterates meaningful differences between DER programs — 19 of 22 programs receive identical scores on the first four CETA-aligned metrics.
- Only 3 of the 11 weighted metrics actually differentiate programs in the final ranking, hinging the methodology on factors arguably peripheral to CETA’s core purpose.
- PSE Substation Batteries received the lowest possible scores on Affordability, Reduced cost impacts, Clean energy jobs, and Outage reduction — while residential, commercial, and utility-scale batteries score the highest on those same metrics.
- PSE simultaneously touts a 3.3 MW Bainbridge Island substation battery as providing $330,000/year in savings, frequency response, and deferred substation investment.
- Corrected scoring proposed by WCEC would rank substation batteries equal to or better than 15 of the other 21 DER programs.