Energy Legal Blog

A central issue in the proceeding will be whether demand response providers are “electricity suppliers,” which the Maryland Code defines as someone “(i) who sells: 1. electricity; 2. electricity supply services; 3. competitive billing services; or 4 competitive metering services; or (ii) who purchase, broker, arrange, or market electricity or electricity supply services for sale to a retail electric customer.” If determined to be electricity suppliers, then demand response providers may be subjected to a host of new licensing and compliance responsibilities, including creditworthiness, registration, marketing, reporting, and record retention, depending on the outcome of the proceeding. (more…)

Baltimore Gas & Electric (BG&E) won Maryland PSC approval late Friday for an $833 million smart grid plan pursuant to which it will install 3,000 smart meter devices per day through 2014. Without timely PSC approval, BG&E risked losing approximately $200 million in Department of Energy subsidies to implement the plan.

The PSC rejected BG&E’s original plan, which included the large-scale build-out of advanced meters and mandatory time-of-use (TOU) billing because the PSC opposed (1) granting BG&E a rate tracker to recover smart grid costs as they are incurred as opposed to following a prudence determination, and (2) imposing TOU rates on all retail customers. The PSC also faulted the original BG&E proposal as doing too little to educate customers on how smart grid programs would work. The PSC nevertheless invited BG&E to resubmit its proposal to address these concerns. (more…)

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on June 17 proposed a rulemaking that, if implemented, has the potential to complete the opening of the transmission grid, an undertaking that began fourteen years ago. Earlier reforms, starting with FERC’s Order No. 888 in 1996, offered for the first time non-discriminatory open access to those who sought to interconnect with and use the grid.  In 2007 Order No. 890 expanded customer participation in the planning and operation of the grid. The new rule proposes to allow all power industry participants to contribute equally to the future design, configuration, and even ownership of the grid.  Public comments on the proposed rulemaking must be submitted to the agency by August, 30, 2010. (more…)

FERC’s Office of Energy Policy and Innovation (OEPI) last week requested comments regarding rate policies, as well as accounting and financial reporting requirements, for new electric-storage technologies such as flywheels and chemical batteries.  OEPI’s goal is to “better understand the various ways electric storage can be used, where each of those uses would fall within established jurisdictional boundaries, and the appropriate rate treatment, accounting classification, and reporting requirements for those uses.”  Comments are due 45 days after the Notice is published in the Federal Register. (more…)

The D.C. Circuit threw into doubt FERC’s station-power policies with a May 4, 2010 ruling, holding that FERC has not explained adequately its authority to prevent states from imposing retail-delivery or other charges for power that generators use for their heating, lighting, air conditioning and office equipment purposes—called “station power”—when that power is deemed to be self-supplied using a monthly netting of what the station delivers to and takes off of the grid. The Court vacated and remanded FERC orders regarding station-power tariff provisions and directed further proceedings, leaving open the possibility that FERC could justify its station-power policies on remand. Generators’ use of station power became an issue of debate in the wake of Order 888’s unbundling of vertically integrated utilities. (more…)

FERC proposed on April 29 to permanently lift the price cap on rates for reassignments of transmission capacity by wholesale transmission customers, following an April 15 study by FERC staff that found a temporary removal of the price cap had not led to any problems or price spikes.   Comments on FERC’s proposal will be due sometime in early July. (more…)