Becomes

The path facing Exelon Corp. and Dynegy Inc. to complete a deal announced last Monday under which Exelon will buy Illinois Power from Dynegy will become “longer and harder” for the companies if the Illinois Legislature doesn’t back a legislative proposal in the near future related to the proposed transaction, Exelon CEO John Rowe said last week.

Price declines in most of the market were fairly modest Friday considering the extra demand loss of a holiday weekend and the trends of moderating weather that were expected to keep temperatures mild in the eastern two-thirds of the U.S. this week. The West even saw gains in California and other points outside the Southwest basins as Rockies supply constraints became a concern.

The Minneapolis-based merchant power subsidiary of Xcel Energy filed its long anticipated voluntary petition for reorganization in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. Several affiliates, including NRG Power Marketing and NRG Northeast Generating LLC, also filed for protection, but parent company Xcel was not pulled under.

After nearly one-and-a-half years of energy market turmoil since the fall of Enron Corp., NRG Energy became the first merchant power company to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Wednesday. The Minneapolis-based merchant power subsidiary of Xcel Energy filed its long anticipated voluntary petition for reorganization in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. Several affiliates, including NRG Power Marketing and NRG Northeast Generating LLC, also filed for protection, but parent company Xcel was not pulled under.

MRT posted a System Protection Warning that becomes effective with the start of Tuesday’s gas day. It is subject to these conditions: MRT will not schedule any Main Line IT, AOR or imbalance volumes for delivery north of Glendale, AR; firm volumes will be limited to their primary direction of flow; MRT is not accepting short imbalance positions; and shippers may not nominate supply from existing long imbalance positions. Saying it has capacity available on the East Line, MRT urged shippers who were relying on Main Line IT, AOR and/or imbalance volumes to re-source supply to the East Line or reduce applicable delivery volumes in order to avoid customer-specific OFOs.

San Francisco-based PG&E Corp. tossed aside the current financial struggles of both its regulated and merchant lines of business , announcing Thursday that it is a charter member of a new private-sector nonprofit, the California Climate Action Registry, a state-created voluntary registry for greenhouse gas emissions. All of PG&E’s businesses will report their greenhouse gas emissions associated with the generation, transmission, distribution and storage of natural gas and electricity in California.

As Gulf of Mexico producers played the waiting game with what was then still Tropical Storm Isidore, nearly all points were united in upward movement Thursday, with flatness at El Paso-Permian and a few Northeast citygates as the exception. Especially in the East, gains were considerably smaller than Wednesday’s spikes; the overall range Thursday tended to be from about a nickel to 15 cents.

Although its agenda has had few major energy items, the extreme delays that seem to surround many issues before the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) in recent months have caused a new informal alliance of old and new members from different political parties. The newest and most controversial CPUC member, Michael Peevey, an economist, former utility senior executive and energy services multi-millionaire entrepreneur, has been unequivocal in chiding CPUC President Loretta Lynch for holding items too long for ostensible legal reasons or incomplete facts.

Gas storage is a strategic asset for any energy portfolio, more critical than it has ever been, as the volatile power market becomes one of the gas industries’ fastest growing customer bases, a panel of natural gas, power and pipeline executives said Wednesday. Speaking at Ziff Energy Group’s North American Gas Storage Conference in Houston, panelists said that despite the current economic downturn and low commodity prices, natural gas storage has become a critical component for all facets of the energy delivery business.