With an indignant, fighting tone questioning the veracity of their accusers’ evidence, major energy companies named as alleged market manipulators in the “mountains of evidence” California officials submitted to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission earlier this month filed their responses Thursday and pulled no punches. One called the California submittal “shoddy work,” and another promised to go to the U.S. Supreme Court to defend its reputation. All expressed feelings of being unfairly accused.

“Regrettably, through this proceeding, the California parties simply have not done the hard and exacting work of investigating the facts,” Charlotte, NC-based Duke Energy said in a prepared summary of its filing, which attempts to show that it “clearly operated appropriately in California.”

Connecticut-based Sempra Energy Trading, the trading arm of San Diego-based Sempra Energy, said in its filing Thursday that its activities in California’s markets “were proper and consistent with the applicable federal and state regulations, as well as within the bounds of normal and legitimate business practices in commodity markets.”

Saying it is totally confident its behavior was “proper and legal,” Atlanta-based Mirant told FERC it is “prepared to defend the reputation of our company and employees all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary.”

In a news release summarizing its filing, Mirant executive vice president, Rick Pershing, said the allegations in the California filing include allegations that are “holdovers from the general absurdity surrounding the energy crisis (of 2000-2001).” He said that despite running its plants in Northern California all out and “beyond environmental restrictions,” the company was attacked and sued by the City of San Francisco for allegedly violating the environmental permits, even though the company claims it obtained special permission from appropriate state and local agencies.

Sempra similarly filed a 62-page response outlining “how the California parties have twisted facts and created revisionist history.” It goes on to blast the “hired experts” cited in the state’s March 3 filing as trying to “reinterpret and retrospectively revise” the market rules that the companies were operating under during the crisis.

Sempra said it has produced “more than 100,000 pages of data” in response to the state’s various investigations and data-gathering exercises, and “out of that mountain of information provided, state officials were not able to produce even a ‘molehill’ of credible evidence to support their dramatic claims.” Instead, Sempra Energy Trading alleged in its filing that the California evidence relies on what Sempra called “distortions, innuendo and guesswork to weave a fabric of unsubstantiated charges.”

Like its colleagues in the other companies, Duke officials took the tact of saying the company had an “outstanding” record during the energy crisis, and stressing that California should not be allowed to “shift accountability,” with what Duke calls “re-packaged accusations” that ignore transaction specific information. Duke said its record was either the best or one of the best for: (minimizing forced outages; keeping its power plants operating, providing every possible megawatt it could produce, and operating in a fully competitive manner).

Sempra said the California evidence ignores the market rules that were in effect, and as such, “California parties have formed the bad habit of equating bona fide trading activity with manipulating the market, and equally bad habit of blaming the supposed deficiencies of the markets they designed on everyone but themselves.”

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