Advisory staff briefed commissioners on a range of proposed improvements to Public Service Company's hosting capacity analyses and related maps. The issues included who should be able to access unblurred HCA data, how often HCAs should be updated, the temporal granularity of HCA results, and a set of usability and validation improvements advocated by developers and intervenors.

On data access, staff recommended removing the utility's non-disclosure agreement requirement while retaining an authentication process to access unblurred maps through a secure portal. Commissioners agreed. "No party opposes the authentication requirement, and it does provide some insurance of legitimate use of data without being overly burdensome," advisory staff said. The panel directed staff to capture that approach in the draft order and to require the utility to document its authentication workflow.

Commissioners also approved a near-term HCA cadence: advisors recommended, and the commissioners supported, an HCA update within 60 days of the final decision using cutoff data no earlier than September 2025; quarterly updates in the interim; and a target for monthly automated HCA updates by 2026. Commissioners did not order civil penalties but left show-cause processes on the table if the utility fails to meet the cadence set in the final order.

Technical improvements ordered or directed for the final order include: publishing higher temporal granularity analyses (both 576-hour samples and full 8,760-hour results) by 2027; fixing discrepancies between pop-up box fields and the tabular HCA data and confirming or updating the publicly posted user guide; devising and filing a formal HCA validation plan within six months of the order; enabling CSV downloads from pop-up boxes; publishing nodal-level HCA results and full limiting criteria (not just the single most-limiting constraint); and adding substation locations and the AVPP-eligible-feeder list to the unblurred map resources. Counsel advised that the commission's 15/15 customer-data rule (Rule 3.033(B)) should be interpreted narrowly so that it does not broadly exclude feeder publication; commissioners accepted that approach and directed staff to allow targeted redactions only where necessary to prevent re-identification of customer-level loads.

Ending: The commission ordered a sequence of data-access and technical improvements to make the HCA a more usable planning tool for developers and staff, set explicit near-term cadence milestones and longer-term deliverables, and left enforcement options open if the utility fails to meet the deadlines in the final order.