This Daily Energy Insider article quotes AEE's Senior Vice President, Lisa Frantzis, who comments on the Illinois Commerce Commission's proposed rule which would allow utilities to treat cloud computing resources as a capital expense. See excerpts below and the entire Daily Energy Insider story here:

A proposed rule by the Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC) that would financially treat utilities’ cloud-based computing software the same as on-site computing systems has found strong support from the renewable energy industry...

The rule is currently under consideration by the the Illinois Joint Committee on Administrative Rules (JCAR), who held a hearing on the matter on Tuesday. Last week, the CEOs of ACORE, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) and the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) wrote to the joint committee, giving unanimous support to efforts that would allow the renewable energy industry to better manage large amounts of data quicker and cheaper. In that way, they emphasized, more rapid deployment of renewables to the grid would be possible.

The CEOs noted in a joint letter that in recent years utility-scale wind and solar energy have grown to provide nearly 8 percent of the nation’s electricity with even more growth expected...

Distributed generation and distributed energy resources have transformed the energy grid with  two-way power flows and increased interconnections across the distribution system. “All of these new technologies are creating large amounts of data and require advanced data management systems for utilities to be able to efficiently accommodate these technologies into the grid,” the letter said.

The rule is on its second notice with the joint committee, which is set to expire in May. The rule was originally posted last year, following stakeholder input. Other groups, such as the national business group Advanced Energy Economy (AEE), have also been supportive of the effort as it works its way toward enactment.

“This is a big step forward and will enable utilities to choose the best technology solutions, whether they be cloud-based or traditional on-site IT, to meet operational needs and serve their customers at the lowest cost,” Lisa Frantzis, senior vice president of the 21st Century Electricity System for AEE, said in June 2018 after the ICC approved the first notice rule. “Utilities have a path forward to capture the benefits of cloud computing, just like other industries.”

The proposed rule is supported by several major companies including Amazon Web Services, CPower, Energy Savvy, EnergyHub, First Fuel, GE, Itron, Nest, Oracle, Salesforce, Siemens and Simple Energy.

See the entire Daily Energy Insider story here.