Seeking to improve market transparency and provide a better means to detect and discourage discriminatory practices, FERC last Wednesday said that it would replace a number of reporting filings currently made by the power industry with a quarterly electronic report, which the Commission believes will equalize reporting requirements for both traditional public utilities and power marketers and make information more easily available to the public.

Under the new rule, both utilities and power marketers would file an electric quarterly report with a summary of the contractual terms and conditions of service for all jurisdictional services, including market-based power sales, cost-based power sales and transmission service. The report would also include transaction information for short-term and long-term market-based power sales and cost-based power sales during the most recent calendar quarter.

The report would replace short- and long-term service agreements for market-based electric energy sales, agreements for generally applicable services, such as point-to-point transmission services, and quarterly transactions reports summarizing short-term sales and purchases of power at market-based rates.

Agreements for transmission, cost-based power sales and other generally applicable services that do not follow a utility tariff’s standard form of agreement must still be filed and reviewed by FERC before they take effect.

The electric quarterly reports will be filed 30 days after each calendar quarter. The Commission noted that the time delay will greatly reduce the usefulness of the data as a tool for collusion, but will give customers data they need for long-term decision making. As FERC further develops its market oversight and monitoring functions, it will continue to explore what information it may need and the most efficient means to obtain relevant information. FERC will post the reports on its web site (www.ferc.gov).

The rule makes the filing requirements of both traditional public utilities and power marketers comparable. Under the final rule, both traditional utilities and power marketers with Commission-approved umbrella tariffs for market-based rates will not be required to file individual service agreements. Rather, utilities and marketers will include contract and transaction data about their market-based power sales in the electric quarterly reports.

FERC Commissioner William Massey noted that some of the parties in this proceeding suggested that the Commission should move to monthly filings of this data “and the rule rejects that proposal and says ‘No, quarterly is fine.”

But Massey said that once a filer has a template established, that filer “either hits the Send button every quarter or I hit it once a month or I hit it once a week.” The Commissioner said that “It’s hard for me to see that requiring the data to be filed more often is in any way more burdensome on the industry, and yet it might provide much greater, quicker transparency in the market place, which it seems to me ought to be what we support.”

With that in mind, Massey queried FERC staff as to whether there is any additional burden to a filer in sending the data to the Commission on a monthly basis.

“Once the software that we’re talking about is in place, it will not be an additional burden, but it does raise confidentiality issues,” a FERC staff member responded. “By reporting it quarterly, there’s the lag of 30 days before the information is disclosed, if you go to monthly, it’ll change that balance.”

“I think the balance comes in, though, on whether people can use prices and what use they can make of them, and that’s why the balance, I think, was imposed at quarterly to have balance between transparency and, as some commenters argue, they’re concerned about possible anticompetitive effects of [having] so much price information available,” another Commission staff member said.

In light of the rule on electric quarterly reports, FERC, in a separate order, dismissed the rehearing requests of a number of power marketers on an earlier policy that would have required power marketers to file long-term transaction agreements.

The rule is effective in 60 days and the first electric quarterly report using an interim report will be filed on July 31, 2002.

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