Context

In the context of opening a United Nations (UN) environmental event in his city Wednesday, Portland, OR, Mayor Charlie Hales called for several Oregon state investment funds to purge themselves of holdings in fossil fuel companies. The state’s largest city already has taken that step, Hales said.

FERC should try to carve out a case precedent for dealing with transmission market power in the broader context of granting market-based rate authority to power companies, Craig Roach, a principal with Boston Pacific Co., said at a technical conference at the Commission last Tuesday.

The critical policy need facing FERC and the power industry in the context of the pricing of must-run generating units is not the mitigation of market power, but rather the correction of market flaws that “create persistent underrecovery” of costs by needed investment, both existing and new, Steve Corneli, an NRG Power Marketing Inc. executive, said last Wednesday.

Within the larger context of expanded capacity and a newly unbundling transmission/storage system, Sempra Energy’s Southern California Gas Co. utility has identified potential future constraints on its intrastate transmission pipeline system in the Imperial and San Joaquin Valleys where power plants and large industrial customers operate. These areas are potentially tight only on a seasonal basis, such as the summer in Imperial and winter in the San Joaquin valley, according to SoCalGas’ Steve Watson, capacity planning manager, who spoke Tuesday at a GasMart/Power panel discussion in Reno.

Within the larger context of expanded capacity and a newly unbundling transmission/storage system, Sempra Energy’s Southern California Gas Co. utility has identified potential future constraints on its intrastate transmission pipeline system in the Imperial and San Joaquin Valleys where power plants and large industrial customers operate. These areas are potentially tight only on a seasonal basis, such as the summer in Imperial and winter in the San Joaquin valley, according to SoCalGas’ Steve Watson, capacity planning manager, who spoke Tuesday at a GasMart/Power panel discussion in Reno.