Energy Legal Blog

PR News announced that Bracewell & Giuliani’s Energy Legal Blog will be recognized as the best “Legal PR Blog” at its annual Corporate Social Responsibility & Legal Awards Luncheon on February 24, 2010 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. This award recognizes an outstanding and influential law-related weblog or online journal written by a representative of the organization with the goal of espousing the brand or a certain message and written with flair and personality.

“Managing a crisis and working with legal counsel are two areas of communication that will always be a part of a PR professional’s responsibilities,” notes Diane Schwartz, vice president of PR News. “The Legal PR Awards shines a light both on how law firms are communicating to their stakeholders and to how the PR industry is in the driver’s seat when a crisis hits.”

More information on the award program and this year’s winners is available at http://www.prnewsonline.com/awards/csr2009_event-finalists.html.

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…)

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) of the US Department of Commerce on September 24 released its first round of almost 80 draft “Smart Grid” standards, which are intended to establish a framework for Smart Grid development.  These initial standards establish a conceptual model for the Smart Grid by (1) addressing how the many complex systems that make up the Smart Grid interrelate to each other; (2) developing a cyber-security strategy; and (3) identifying interfaces for which interoperability standards are needed.  (Interoperability-a key issue in standards for the Smart Grid-refers to the ability of diverse systems and their components to work together.)  The standards are available for public comment for the next 30 days (until around October 24, 2009), after which NIST will finalize them and send them to FERC for final approval and formal issuance.

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The Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) on June 10, 2009, issued its final order denying Kelson Transmission Company, LLC’s (Kelson) application for a certificate of convenience and necessity to construct and operate a 95-mile 345 Kilovolt open-access transmission line, for which Kelson initially sought certification in August of 2007.  The transmission line was planned to connect the 1,160 Megawatt Cottonwood electric generation facility located in the Southeast Reliability Council (SERC) to a substation in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) located on the CenterPoint Houston Electric Company, LLC transmission grid. (more…)

On May 21, 2009, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (“FERC”) solicited supplemental comments in the Smart Grid Policy docket specifically related to how it should address requests for rate recovery from public utilities to install Smart Grid facilities that are not paid for through U.S. Department of Energy (“DOE”) funds, such as those authorized under the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.  FERC also wanted comments on whether granting conditional approval of Smart Grid projects would prove helpful to public utilities in seeking federal funding. 

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In a June 19 order FERC approved with minor exceptions the Severity Levels that the North American Electric Reliability Corporation has proposed for violating requirements of its reliability standards.  In an earlier order FERC requested NERC expedite development of Severity Levels to be used in setting penalties for reliability standard violations.

A violation may be assessed “Lower”, “Moderate”, “High”, or “Severe”.  The Severity Level will be used to set a Base Penalty Amount in accordance with the Base Penalty Amount Table provided in NERC’s Sanction Guidelines.  Severity Levels do not consider adjustment factors that are evaluated in a later step in the penalty assessment process.  FERC does not consider Severity Levels to be a part of the Reliability Standards; this treatment is similar to FERC’s treatment of Violation Risk Factors and Sanction Guidelines.  Instead, Severity Levels will be appended to NERC’s Rules of Procedure. 

NERC also offered for informational purposes only guidelines for reviewing future Severity Level, but FERC chose to adopt its own guidelines.  When reviewing future Severity Levels, FERC’s guidelines require that the levels:  (1) not induce lower levels of compliance; (2) ensure uniformity and consistency in penalty determinations; (3) to be consistent with the corresponding reliability standard requirement; and (4) be based on a single violation, and not cumulative violations.