Commission Watch

Upstate Uproar

Retail Choice: New York utilities cry “bait and switch,” but it’s not that simple.

If you take electric service from Orange & Rockland Utilities, the Catskills affiliate of Manhattan’s Con Ed, you can switch to a competitive retail supplier and score a 7 percent discount. But the discount lasts for two months. After that, if you haven’t signed a contract or taken some other action to lock in your discount, your ESCO can boost the commodity rate back to the old level—or even higher.
Byline: 

Bruce W. Radford

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Reliability Wars

Power System Planning: Who gets paid (and how much) for backing up the system?

“Confining transmission projects to FTR payments is like confining generators to energy-only payments,” says Ed Krapels, the electric industry consultant from Boston who helped dream up the initial idea of the Neptune project. These words speak volumes on what’s happening in today’s power industry, and on what the ISOs and RTOs are trying to achieve, not only for merchant-grid projects but for merchant generation and system reliability.
Byline: 

Bruce W. Radford

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Exelon's Epic End Game

Electric M&A: The merger with PSE&G may herald a new industry structure, squarely at odds with regional markets.

The marriage between Exelon and PSEG would create the largest electric utility in the United States. The policy implications could loom even larger, however. Standing at risk is nothing less than FERC’s entire regulatory regime for approval of mergers and market-based rates.
Byline: 

Bruce W. Radford

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Gas Transport Rates: A Puzzling Prospect

Why does FERC want to limit pipeline discounts?

It's certainly puzzling, if not downright peculiar. That's the feeling one gets after studying the notice of inquiry (NOI) that FERC launched late last year, after nearly 10 years of dragging its feet, to re-examine the wisdom of encouraging the practice of rate discounting by interstate natural gas pipelines.
Byline: 

Bruce W. Radford

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Alaskan Gas Development: One Pipeline, Two Systems

FERC may have to carve out a special set of rules if it wants to bring Arctic gas south to the lower-48.

When President Bush signed the Alaska Natural Gas Pipeline Act of 2004, one might have thought that North Slope gas was on the fast track. With all the special provisions that Congress has added to the bill, the reality may prove otherwise.
Byline: 

Bruce W. Radford

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LICAP and Its Lessons: A Kink in the Curve

Doubts intensify over New England’s radical new market for electric capacity.

What began nearly two years ago as a simple request by power producers to boost their chances for recovering fixed costs for several power plants in Connecticut has mushroomed into the single most complicated case now pending before FERC.
Byline: 

Bruce W. Radford

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PJM/Midwest Market: Two Rival Groups Battle Over Grid Pricing

Should transmission owners get paid extra for distance and voltage?

While the Midwest now appears set on competitive bidding for the electricity commodity, taking from PJM such tried-and-true elements as locational marginal pricing, financial transmission rights, and a day-ahead market with a security-constrained dispatch, the region remains split over the pricing of transmission.
Byline: 

Bruce Radford

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