Energy Legal Blog

By David Perlman and Andrew McLain

In the first significant action by new Enforcement Director Norman C. Bay, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (“FERC”) recently introduced a notice procedure designed to increase the transparency and disclosure of FERC Enforcement investigations. Under this new procedure, FERC will now publicly release the identity, alleged conduct, and claimed violations underlying FERC’s investigations through a “Notice of Violation”, which will be issued soon after the institution of an enforcement investigation. The effect of the new policy is that FERC investigations will now be made public at an early stage after a preliminary determination to move forward has been made, but apparently before many substantive investigatory actions have been taken. (more…)

On November 13, FERC cleared 564 enforcement cases that the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) had presented to the agency for reliability rule violations. Most of the violations were “self-reported” and were assigned low or medium risk factors, the most common being failure to develop sabotage reporting procedures, with the second leading violation being failure to implement maintenance and testing programs. NERC and the Regional Entities assessed monetary penalties to eight violators that had a total of 23 violations (4% of the all violations), amounting to $91,000 in fines. (more…)