The IRP is “encouraging” in how it approaches demand and system planning but is “disappointing” in its resource procurement, said Brian Turner, a policy director at Advanced Energy United. The solar and storage resources are “significant,” he said, but “we have good reason to believe that they could do substantially better in their solicitation of bids.”

NV Energy’s IRP has some improvements over past iterations, said AEU’s Turner. The utility has moved to an integrated grid planning perspective, “so their distributed resources are being better integrated into their load and supply needs.” And they have developed an approach to distributed resources that emphasizes the grid value created by those resources rather than focusing only on localized demand reductions, he said.

But Turner also said NV Energy’s approach to project development lags best practices developed in states such as Colorado, where the utility IRP is used to determine resource needs that are then filled through an all-source procurement. 

“NV Energy issues occasional RFPs, receives those bids, negotiates privately with the projects that it likes best, and we as stakeholders, and certainly the development community, have no insight into how that process occurs,” Turner said.

“I think they could have done better, and different, on proposing those gas resources if they had a more robust program for renewable procurement,” he said.

The PUC will likely spend about six months reviewing the IRP before issuing a decision, Turner said. “We’ll have testimony and cross-testimony and a hearing, and then the commission will make its decision,” he said. “We’ll argue around details, like how they could do more, cheaper, better, with more distributed resources.”

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