A group of U.S. senators last week urged FERC Chairman Pat Wood to drop his agency’s plans to implement its sweeping standard market design (SMD) for U.S. wholesale power market, advice that Wood declined to take, Sen. Peter Domenici (R-NM) told a gathering of reporters on Wednesday.

At the Tuesday meeting between the senators and Wood, “it was urged upon him that he abandon the idea and he didn’t leave there agreeing to that, obviously, nor did I ask him to do that,” Domenici said at a Washington, DC, press briefing sponsored by the Energy Daily and the U.S. Energy Association (USEA).

Domenici said that “nobody knows enough about” SMD and “as a consequence, there are way too many questions and too many notions that it will cause more problems than it will solve.”

Wood “understands that we have a number of opportunities to stop him and the threat is out there that unless we understand it, know what it is and can comprehend it as it applies to the myriad of different supply sources, obviously there would be activity in the Senate to stop his authority to continue with that approach.”

Domenici noted that FERC plans to issue a white paper fleshing out the SMD proposal this spring. There is an understanding that during this timeframe Wood and his staff will make themselves available “to consult with and talk with senators and their staff about SMD as it might impact them.”

This week’s meeting between lawmakers and Wood comes as Congress starts to take the first steps towards crafting a comprehensive energy bill.

“It’s obvious the one…overwhelming portion of this bill is the electricity portion,” Domenici said. “It is, without question, already causing the most concern, almost consternation, I might say, among senators on both sides of the aisle.”

Meanwhile, Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), in a separate appearance before a USEA-Energy Daily briefing, was asked whether House energy bill legislation would include language telling FERC what it may or may not do with respect to the SMD proposal.

“We’re not going to have language that prohibits the FERC from doing certain things,” the lawmaker responded. Barton said that the SMD proposal “was developed a little bit in a vacuum because there wasn’t anything being done legislatively in the House and the Senate.”

He said that while one can quibble with the specifics of the proposal, “you can’t argue” with FERC’s goal of trying to create a national power grid “that can move power around the country under a set of rules that everybody has access to the grid and an equal chance to use it, and that’s a good thing.”

Barton added, “We’re not going to take a direct aim at the SMD in a positive way or negative way, but many of the things that that order is attempting to address are things that our bill will address.”

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