ferc

President Bush has announced his intention to nominate Joseph Timothy Kelliher to fill out the five-member Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

FERC Chief Administrative Law Judge Curtis Wagner Jr. yesterday “strongly encourage[d]” parties to reach a monetary settlement in the high-profile case in which California regulators have accused El Paso Natural Gas and El Paso Merchant Energy Co. (EPME) of illegally manipulating natural gas prices in California and committing affiliate violations.

In the report on the adjournment of the FERC hearing investigating alleged market affiliate abuses by El Paso Natural Gas and its affiliates, which ran in NGI’s Daily Gas Price Index for Tuesday, Aug. 7: Note El Paso executives did not refuse to respond to questions from Judge Wagner. El Paso attorneys declined to put the executives on the stand — which would have subjected them to questions from the California Public Utilities Commission and others — as part of the case, saying El Paso’s case was closed. The attorneys said, however, the executives were willing to respond to the judge’s questions. Wagner did not ask any questions.

FERC Chief Administrative Law Judge Curtis L. Wagner stunned his courtroom yesterday when he abruptly adjourned the affiliate-abuse phase of the hearing exploring charges against El Paso Natural Gas and affiliate El Paso Merchant Energy after the company refused to put El Paso Corp. Chairman William Wise and other top corporate executives on the stand to respond to questions from Wagner.

PG&E Gas Transmission Northwest Corp. got the thumbs-up from FERC yesterday to expand the capacity of its system in the Pacific Northwest by 210,800 Dth/d on an annual firm basis.

A FERC administrative law judge has issued an initial opinion, dividing the allocation of generation capacity costs to interruptible load on the Entergy Corp. system into pre-1995 and post-1995 time periods to reflect Entergy’s change in its system planning in the latter period to exclude interruptible load.

A California gubernatorial candidate and current secretary of state, Bill Jones, Thursday told major power generators and marketers they need to make some changes in how they do business in the state, or face the possible wrath of the state voters next year with an anti-electric industry ballot measure.

In the midst of an ever-widening series of battles facing merchant electricity generators during California’s energy crisis, the state’s small generator trade association Wednesday lauded the newly inked deal with Southern California Edison Co. and many of the state’s small qualifying facility (QF) generators as good for consumers and a means of “stabilizing” state wholesale power prices. A string of legal suits by both the utility and QFs has been suspended as a result.

Williams’ Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line had an active day yesterday filing two applications with FERC to expand its eastern pipeline system. Its Momentum expansion project would add 526,000 Dth/d of firm capacity from Station 65 in Louisiana to markets in Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas, and its Leidy East project would make up for the failed Phase III portion of its MarketLink expansion.