If PJM markets should lose demand response as a capacity resource.
Bruce W. Radford is publisher and editor-in-chief of Public Utilities Fortnightly. Reach him at radford@pur.com.
December 16, 2014. Remember the date. For, unless the U.S. Supreme Court agrees to step in to mediate, that likely marks the last day for the stay of execution that till now has delayed any enforcement of EPSA v. FERC. That's the case, decided this past spring, which struck down Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Order 745, governing how much to pay electric consumers who agree to curtail their power usage through demand response (DR) to help balance supply and load. Such payments, the court said, lie outside FERC's jurisdiction over wholesale energy markets:
"Demand response - simply put - is part of the retail market."
That ruling came as a bombshell. But there's more. FirstEnergy now has dared FERC to go one better: to extend the EPSA rationale to apply not only to wholesale energy markets, but also to capacity markets run by PJM, the regional grid operator for the Mid-Atlantic states, and perhaps other grid regions, such as the New York or the New England ISO.