SCE gets ready to greenlight southern Cal muni projects
Southern California Edison Company is proposing changes to its tariff schedule, a move that should finally pave the way for a long-delayed Wi-Fi project in Diamond Bar, California.Southern California Edison Company is proposing changes to its tariff schedule, a move that should finally pave the way for a long-delayed Wi-Fi project in Diamond Bar, California.
James Granelli of the Los Angeles Times made an issue of this bottleneck last year in an article about how local electric utilities in general, and Southern California Edison in particular, were blocking the deployment of municipal wireless broadband networks.
The problems delayed Diamond Bar’s project for more than a year. SCE originally suggested that the city pay as much as $2,000 per month per pole, the same as commercial cellphone carriers to attach antennas to utility poles.
In an agreement to provide unmetered electric service for Wi-Fi devices attached to its poles, SCE has asked the Public Utilities Commission of California “to permit cities and qualified commercial providers of Wireless (Wi-Fi) Internet service to:
(1) attach to SCE-owned streetlight facilities (streetlights) Wi-Fi transmitting equipment (devices) used for such Wi-Fi Internet service; and
(2) power the devices with unmetered electricity from SCE’s distribution system.”
The proposal has its qualifications. SCE conducted a two-month pilot study on 36 streetlamps across five circuits and concluded “though not initially designed to accommodate additional load, (the lighting system) has some limited capacity for incidental loading. Thirty five (35) watts is the maximum incidental load which can be added to 50 percent of the streetlight population, (that is, every other adjacent streetlight) without adversely impacting the operation of the streetlight system.”
Click here (PDF) to download the SCE filing.
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