New York Sets Privacy Screens, Datasets For Utility Energy Registry Of Aggregated Customer Data

A written order issued by the New York PSC contains details concerning the PSC's approval of a Utility Energy Registry (UER) which will provide aggregated utility customer and load data to various stakeholders, including municipal aggregations

The UER is an online platform designed to offer streamlined public access to aggregated customer load data for electric and natural gas, segmented by customer type and by municipality, including total load, ICAP tag, and customer counts

Concerning privacy screens, the PSC said that, in balancing the benefits of making more anonymized, aggregated energy data available while maintaining customer privacy, the Commission will not modify the existing 15/15 standard as applied to the Residential grouping in light of the low failure rates (roughly 4-7% of trialed tax districts) for the Residential grouping. The 15/15 (15-by-15) standard permits a set of aggregated data to be considered sufficiently anonymous for public distribution only if that data includes at least 15 customers, with no customer accounting for more than 15% of the total consumption.

If the application of the 15/15 standard becomes a barrier to data availability, the Commission is open to revisiting this standard, the PSC said

The Commission adopted a 6/40 standard for the Small Commercial and Other groupings. This standard will reduce the rate of failures significantly (to roughly 10% for Small Commercial, although the failure rates for Other remain high) while still offering a large enough aggregation to avoid revealing individual usage, the PSC said

In terms of geospatial layers, the PSC said that the utilities should be prepared to report data across their service territories in three layers, including zip code, incorporated municipality, and county. The UER will only collect and display zip code level data for New York City, and for the rest of the State will focus on reporting incorporated municipality level data.

To clarify and simplify the account datasets, the Commission will direct the following items be reported to the UER for the Residential and Small Commercial grouping: total customer count and count of customers ineligible for CCA (including customers served by ESCOs, customers with a block on their account, and customers ineligible for any other reason, e.g., TOU customers not eligible for CCA). The PSC will not require reporting of APP counts as this information is sensitive and specific to the particular CCA programs that may be developed. CCA administrators can obtain information concerning APP counts directly from utilities in connection with specific CCA programs. APPs will be included in the total customer count and will not be presumed to be ineligible for CCA.

The Commission did not adopt the proposal to report CCA-eligible load to the UER. The total load and the number of customer accounts eligible for CCA will be available to help gauge the potential for productive CCA development. Specific CCA load data can be obtained directly from utilities as described in the CCA Framework Order and CCA Data Order, the PSC said

The Commission declined to adopt the proposals to have DER data reported to the UER at this time. DER data, in the form of initial hosting capacity and interconnection queue data, are already available through DPS and electric utilities’ websites. Future revisions to the existing hosting capacity maps, providing more granular and accurate DER data is expected as part of the DSIP proceeding. DER reporting has not been sufficiently refined in the context of the UER, the PSC said