In response to the COVID-19 health crisis, businesses and trade associations alike have shifted to remote work options, making many adjustments along the way. We hope that all of you, your coworkers, families, and friends are safe and remain healthy — and have transitioned well to this new reality. Today we share some tips from a lively internal email thread at AEE, where some of our staff have worked remotely for more than eight years (some for 15 or longer in prior roles), and now the rest of us are working from home as well. We have refined many tools and systems for productive, impactful advocacy work from dispersed locations. But the current situation is far more extreme, with travel restrictions, offices closed, and shelter-in-place orders. We need all the tricks of the work-from-home trade to succeed in our work and in our mental state. Here, we share the best of them with you.

Note: This was originally posted on powersuite-blog.aee.net

Can’t find toilet paper or eggs at the grocery store? We can’t help you there. But we can help you find everything you need to know about what’s happening in state public utility commission dockets and legislation around the country related to energy and COVID-19.  And since schools are closed and many of us are trying to figure out how to make learning fun, we’ll do this in the form of an interactive map and a coronavirus acrostic.

In 2018,  topics trending on the internet ranged from the Supreme Court confirmation hearings to the royal wedding. But on PowerSuite, AEE’s online tool for identifying and managing energy policy risks and opportunities, the trends looked a little different. Similar to YouTube or Twitter, “trending” in PowerSuite means an item is popular among users and particularly active, in terms of hearings, amendments, floor action, or regulatory filings. This year, legislation providing incentives for customer-sited energy storage in California and a utility’s resource plan in Michigan were the top bill and regulatory proceeding, respectively, trending on PowerSuite. But there’s more to be learned about energy policy in 2018 from choices made by PowerSuite’s 1,400 active monthly users.

Does your utility sell you power from its own power plants, or procure power on the open market on your behalf? Do you have the right to shop around for your electric power among competitive providers? Do other states do this the same way? Do you even know?

Now you can know all this - and more.

Note: several links in this article reference documents housed in DocketDash, an application in AEE's new energy policy software, PowerSuite. To enhance your reading experience, click here and sign up for a free 14-day trial of PowerSuite.

Three months ago, the two largest investor-owned electric utilities in Arizona submitted proposals to the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) that would allow them to own residential solar systems and, effectively, become players in Arizona’s competitive distributed solar market. The proposals sparked a controversy over whether monopoly utilities should be allowed to own rooftop solar. Now the ACC Staff has recommended that the Commission accept one of the proposals. If the ACC accepts the staff recommendation, it could open the door for more utility-owned distributed generation (DG) in Arizona.