Adjustable Block Program Lottery Event Details

Adjustable Block Program Lottery Event Details

The Illinois Power Agency and the Program Administrator announce the following details for the Adjustable Block Program lottery to be held on April 10, 2019.

As previously announced, lotteries will be held for the following Groups/categories: Group A – Large Distributed Generation (“DG”), Group A – Community Solar, and Group B – Community Solar.

Event details

If you cannot attend in person, a toll-free call-in number is available to listen to the proceedings:

888-494-4032; Access Code: 9897235124

Order/Explanation of the Lottery Event

The Lottery Event will start with a brief overview of the lottery process and then lotteries will be conducted in the following order:

1. Group A – Large DG
2. Group A – Community Solar
   1. Projects that have committed to at least 50% small subscribers (50% of the combined capacity of Blocks 1 and 2)
   2. All remaining unselected projects (50% of the combined capacity of Blocks 1 and 2
3. Group B – Community Solar
   1. Projects that have committed to at least 50% small subscribers (50% of the combined capacity of Blocks 1 and 2)
   2. All remaining unselected projects (50% of the combined capacity of Blocks 1 and 2)

The selection of projects for the lottery will be conducted using the algorithm explained in further detail below. For each lottery, once the algorithm has been run, the results will be displayed with all projects listed by ordinal rank, including indications of projects selected (including specific pricing) and projects placed on the waitlist. A hard copy of the results will be printed, signed, and retained by the IPA (to back up the electronic records).

All Approved Vendors with projects in the lottery will be informed immediately after the lottery event by e-mail of the ordinal rank and selected, or not-selected, status of their project(s). This information will also be displayed on their online dashboard. A public copy of the results will also be posted on the illinoisshines.com website immediately after the lottery event.

For the results of the lottery that will be posted to the program website, each project participating in the lottery will be listed by the project name provided by the Approved Vendor, selection status, the project size, the physical address, the name of the Approved Vendor, any small subscriber commitment status (community solar only), any voluntarily provided utility interconnection queue number, and the random ordinal number assigned to the project.

Algorithm/Project Selection

The algorithm used for the selection of projects is written the programming language PHP and the database language MySQL. The algorithm uses the SQL rand() function seeded by the microsecond time the lottery button was pushed to order the results.

Projects will be selected based upon their ordinal rank. Projects selected up to the combined capacity of Blocks 1 and 2 for the Group/category will receive Block 1 pricing. Projects selected up to the capacity of Block 3 will receive Block 3 pricing. Any projects selected through the allocation of discretionary capacity will receive Block 4 pricing. Additional information on the allocation of discretionary capacity will be announced shortly.

As noted above, for community solar, the lottery is run in two phases, once for projects that have committed to 50% small subscribers for half the capacity available for that Group, and then again for all non-selected projects from the first phase and the remaining projects that did not make a small subscriber commitment.

Contracts for selected projects are subject to approval by the Illinois Commerce Commission.

Applications received after February 13

The project application portal will remain open for application submittals. However, for the Group/category combinations for which a lottery is being held, any applications submitted after the 12:00 noon, February 13, 2019 deadline for the lottery will be chronologically placed on the waiting list behind projects submitted to, but not selected in, the lottery. Due to the large number of projects submitted to those Group/category combinations, the waitlist in these Group/category combinations may be significantly long. Please keep this in mind in submitting future applications to these Group/category combinations. Group A and Group B – Small DG both remain open in Block 1, and Group B – Large DG remains open in Block 2 through April 5, 2019 (subject to available capacity).