Three California distributed energy bills reach the governor's desk; the one on household meter data died in committee

Three California bills on distributed energy passed both chambers before the legislature adjourned and are now with Governor Gavin Newsom, who has until the end of September to sign or veto them. A fourth, the only one of the four that would have changed what a household can see rather than what an aggregator can sell, never reached a floor vote. It was held under submission in Senate Appropriations on 13 August 2026 and did not come back.

What survived

SB 913, by Senator Josh Becker, adds Section 380.1 to the Public Utilities Code. On or before 30 June 2028 the California Public Utilities Commission must establish the conditions under which distributed resources receive capacity credit for energy exported past the utility meter, while preventing "duplicate compensation, through both the aggregated distributed energy resource and the retail bill credits". It must ensure qualifying capacity methodologies credit both load reductions and net exports in the specific hour required for resource adequacy showings, allow aggregated distributed energy resources to qualify for local, system or flexible resource adequacy, permit "multiple devices to participate behind the same utility point of interconnection", and require load-serving entities to include aggregated resources in their resource adequacy filings. It also directs the commission to send the California Independent System Operator recommendations on its proxy demand resource and distributed energy resource aggregation models by the same date. The Assembly passed it 59 to 3 on 25 August, the Senate concurred 40 to 0 on 27 August, and it was presented to the governor on 2 September. Canary Media reports that Pacific Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison withdrew their opposition after amendments in late June.

SB 905, also Becker, is the least discussed and arguably the most structural. It requires the commission to establish three grid utilization metrics for large electrical corporations: capacity utilization, measuring average electricity delivered over a distribution segment against that segment's maximum capacity; peak utilization, measuring peak load against the same denominator; and off-peak load-hosting capacity, estimating how much new load a segment can take outside its highest peak hours. The commission must consider setting a target and timeline for raising average utilization, and must require utilities to assess whether load flexibility and distribution-connected storage could resolve a distribution need more cheaply than conventional upgrades. A report to the legislature is due on or before 31 December 2028. It cleared the Assembly on 30 August, the Senate concurred 29 to 10 the same day, and it reached the governor on 1 September.

AB 1813, by Assemblymember Ward, rewrites the customer renewable energy subscription programme. Community generators are capped at 5 MW of generation and 5 MW of storage each; the programme is capped at 4 GW or seven years of new enrolment, whichever comes first; and at least 51 per cent of programme capacity must serve low-income customers. Bill credits are to be based on the avoided costs of the community generators, using the commission's existing methods for valuing the full set of benefits of customer-generator distributed resources. The California Energy Commission must identify load-modifying attributes by 1 December 2027, and the CPUC must adopt or modify the programme within 180 days of that. The Senate passed it 30 to 10 on 30 August, the Assembly concurred 52 to 12 on 31 August, and it was presented to the governor on 14 September. Investor-owned utilities opposed it on cost-shift grounds.

What died

AB 1787, by Assemblymember Schultz, would have added Section 729.3. It required large electrical corporations to give customers "near real-time energy usage data directly from the smart meter" at no extra charge and in "a standardized machine-readable format", to give load-serving entities usage data no later than 24 hours after measurement, and to let customers authorise third parties to use that data to manage onsite demand.

It also carried a rate mandate. Each large utility would have had to offer at least one dynamic rate option within 18 months of upgraded smart meter infrastructure being placed into service, combining a time-varying distribution rate reflecting distribution grid constraints with a time-varying generation rate for bundled customers reflecting day-ahead hourly wholesale conditions, and would have had to make the same time-varying distribution rates available to bundled and unbundled customers in the same area.

It was placed on the Senate Appropriations suspense file on 3 August on a 7 to 0 vote and held under submission ten days later. Bills die on the suspense file for stated fiscal reasons and without a recorded vote against their substance, which is a different death from being defeated.

Why it matters

Read as a set, the three survivors all operate on the same side of the household's relationship with the grid. SB 913 decides how an edge resource is counted for resource adequacy. AB 1813 decides what a community generator's output is worth. SB 905 decides what the utility must measure about its own network before it spends money enlarging it. Each is a rule about valuation, settlement or planning, and each is addressed to an institution: the commission, the utility, the load-serving entity, the aggregator.

AB 1787 was the only one addressed to the customer. Near real-time access to your own consumption is not a compensation question; it is the precondition for acting on any tariff, programme or price signal at all. A dynamic rate without visible data is a rate you cannot respond to except through an intermediary that can see what you cannot. Compensation frameworks cleared appropriations; the data-access and dynamic-rate mandate did not. That is a reasonable description of how this market is being assembled: the aggregator is given the instrument, and the customer is given the rate.

The legislature has also, without appearing to intend it, walked into an argument already in progress. SB 913 tells the commission to prevent duplicate compensation between an aggregation and retail bill credits. That is the identical objection CPUC Energy Division staff and the Public Advocates Office filed against CAISO's DDEMI Track 1 proposal this July, where they argued that counting behind-the-meter exports in demand response performance would pay the same kilowatt-hour twice. The ISO rejected the characterisation on the grounds that retail and wholesale compensation are ex ante and ex post valuations of different services. SB 913 now instructs the commission to settle the question and then send its conclusions to the ISO.

Whether any of this becomes law is a separate matter. Newsom vetoed three comparable bills on 4 October 2025: AB 44, AB 740 and SB 541. The stated reasons were process and money rather than principle. AB 44 "does not align" with the commission's resource adequacy reform work. AB 740 would impose "costs to the CEC's primary operating fund", which he described as carrying a structural deficit. SB 541 would be "disruptive of existing and planned efforts". Two things differ this year: the largest investor-owned utilities dropped their opposition to SB 913, and its obligations fall on the commission rather than on the Energy Commission's operating fund. Becker's argument for it has stayed the same: "If we can call on these resources, it is a massive win-win."

What is still unknown

Whether the governor has acted on any of the three. All three were checked against the legislature's own bill status records on 20 September 2026 and none showed a signature, veto or chaptering. [UNVERIFIED: the precise constitutional deadline for each bill was not checked against Article IV of the California Constitution; the end-of-September date is as reported by Canary Media.]

Why AB 1787 was held. [NEEDS DATA: the Senate Appropriations fiscal analysis and the cost estimate attached to near-real-time meter data access.]

Whether AB 1787's author intends to reintroduce it, and whether the data provisions could be severed from the dynamic rate mandate that probably carried the cost.

[NEEDS DATA: enrolled megawatts in California's Demand Side Grid Support programme.] Canary Media reports nearly 75,000 homes with smart thermostats and flexible load devices and nearly 130,000 homes with batteries, without an as-of date or an attributed source. Household counts are not capacity. [UNVERIFIED: both enrolment figures.]

What the investor-owned utilities filed against AB 1813, beyond the cost-shift objection reported in trade coverage.

Sources

California SB 913 (Becker), text and status: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260SB913 and https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billStatusClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260SB913

California SB 905 (Becker), text and status: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260SB905 and https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billStatusClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260SB905

California AB 1813 (Ward), text and status: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1813 and https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billStatusClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1813

California AB 1787 (Schultz), text and status: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1787 and https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billStatusClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1787

Canary Media, Jeff St. John, 26 August 2026: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/virtual-power-plants/california-virtual-power-plant-bills-clear-key-legislative-hurdle

Canary Media, 8 October 2025, on the 2025 vetoes and their stated reasons: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/virtual-power-plants/why-did-newsom-veto-californias-virtual-power-plant-bills

CAISO, DDEMI Track 1 draft final proposal, 8 July 2026, for the duplicate-compensation exchange: https://stakeholdercenter.caiso.com/InitiativeDocuments/Draft-Final-Proposal-Demand-and-Distributed-Energy-Market-Integration-DDEMI-Track1-Jul-08-2026.pdf