EVALUATION OF BIDS’ PROJECT VIABILITY. The implementation of the Project Viability Calculator as a screening tool for use in the evaluation of Offers has brought several advantages: • The Calculator is a step in the direction of more standardized evaluation of viability across all three IOUs. • The Calculator provides a broader set of criteria by which projects are assessed than was the case with PG&E’s prior approach to scoring viability. • The range of scores from zero to 100 gives more visibility to differences between projects than methods that use single-digit scores. • The methodology allows PG&E to use both the more standardized tool as well as business judgment in taking project characteristics into account when making short list decisions. There are still opportunities to improve the use of the Calculator. • Some of the scoring guidelines for the Calculator are sufficiently ambiguous that reasonable individuals scoring the same project can arrive at different results. When the scores rated by Xxxxxx and the PG&E team were compared, the variance between scores had a standard deviation of 12 points. Even among individual members of the PG&E team there was a need to review and standardize scoring to reduce discrepancies between individuals’ practices. This suggests that the Calculator is still a crude screening tool with a lot of noise in the scoring process, and that differences of only two or three points between projects should not be regarded as determinative in selecting one and rejecting the other, because the difference falls within the error of the analysis. • As evidenced by feedback from Participants, developers in general have a poor understanding of how the utility interprets the scoring guidelines. Many developers, for example, claimed not understand that their project cannot obtain a score of 10 out of 10 for project development experience if their team has never brought at least two projects of equal or larger size with similar technology into operation…even though that is explicitly what the scoring guidelines in the Calculator state. • Some scoring criteria would be difficult for a layperson to interpret, such as the Transmission System Upgrade Requirements criterion that requires some basic knowledge of what components of an upgrade require or don’t require a CPUC Permit to Construct of Notice of Construction. Many or most developers lack on- staff experts in the regulatory landscape for new transmission build in California. • Some of the Offers were scored low simply be...
