Administrative

FERC Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) Bobbie McCartney last Thursday ruled that power contracts entered into between four power suppliers — Dynegy Power Marketing, El Paso Merchant Energy, Morgan Stanley Capital Group and Sempra Energy Resources — and the California Department of Water Resources (CDWR) during the state’s 2000-2001 energy crisis should be held to a standard that will make it tougher for California to overturn those contracts.

FERC Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) H. Peter Young has ordered several Enron-affiliated wind farm projects and Southern California Edison Co. to file a status report by the end of next week on their efforts to complete a settlement that would resolve assertions made by Edison that the projects failed to comply with the Commission’s regulations for qualifying facility (QF) status.

A FERC administrative law judge (ALJ) urged the full Commission last Thursday to dismiss a series of complaints brought by power companies in Nevada, California and Washington seeking to reform above-market electric contracts that they entered into with generators during the height of the western energy crisis in 2000 and 2001.

Under preliminary findings issued late Thursday by a FERC administrative law judge California state agencies would owe power generators $1.2 billion in unpaid bills over and above the refund amounts flowing the other way under a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission mitigation formula. The state currently owes generators $3 billion which it failed to pay for power during the western energy crisis. It could subtract $1.8 billion of that which would be refunds to the CAISO and the Cal-PX under the mitigation formula.

In a very broad initial decision issued last Tuesday, a FERC administrative law judge (ALJ) shot down nearly all of Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line’s arguments in support of rolled-in rates for several Southeast expansions of the pipeline’s system that were built in the late 1990s. Instead, he recommended incremental pricing of the projects, which requires only those customers who directly benefit from expansions to pay the costs.

In a very broad initial decision issued late Tuesday, a FERC administrative law judge (ALJ) shot down nearly all of Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line’s arguments in support of rolled-in rates for several Southeast expansions of the pipeline’s system that were built in the late 1990s. Instead, he recommended incremental pricing of the projects, which requires only those customers who directly benefit from expansions to pay the costs.

The administrative filing by TXU Corp.’s European business unit will have no effect on North American or Australian businesses, the Dallas corporation reported last week. However, the utility giant will ask shareholders for permission to reclassify nearly $7.5 billion of equity to “surplus” capital from “stated” capital to fund its dividend, which was slashed by 80% last month as TXU Europe collapsed.

The administrative filing by TXU Corp.’s European business unit will have no effect on North American or Australian businesses, the Dallas corporation said. However, the utility giant will ask shareholders for permission to reclassify nearly $7.5 billion of equity to “surplus” capital from “stated” capital to fund its dividend, which was slashed by 80% last month as TXU Europe collapsed.

In a much-anticipated initial decision Monday, Chief Administrative Law Judge Curtis Wagner found that El Paso Natural Gas withheld “extremely large amounts of capacity” from shippers on its system to drive up prices for natural gas delivered to the southern California border during the critical November 2000-March 2001 period. He called this “a clear exercise of market power.”