Urged

A large group of generators last Monday collectively urged FERC to reject a bid by several California parties to gain access to documents or materials produced or obtained by the agency in its nearly year-long investigation of manipulation in western energy markets.

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.

As FERC mulls whether to require generators to certify that outages at their facilities are due to a valid, technical reason, a leading academic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) last Wednesday suggested that operators of power plants adopt a protocol for how they “call” outages, which in turn would be audited internally and ultimately signed off on by top corporate executives with power suppliers.

Rather than make the lower just and reasonable standard the default measuring stick used in reviews of wholesale power contracts, FERC should instead adopt an approach touted by FERC Commissioners Nora Brownell and Linda Breathitt that would apply the more stringent public interest standard by default to such situations, a number of industry participants recently told the Commission.

Canada’s Ambassador to the United States, Michael Kergin, urged Congress last week to reject the Alaska pipeline route restrictions that were approved the prior week by the Energy Conference Committee as part of the energy bill (see NGI, Sept. 16). Speaking at RBC Financial Group’s Distinguished Speakers Series at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, the ambassador also expressed Canada’s opposition to proposed subsidies for Alaskan gas production. A vote on the subsidies and other tax-related provisions will be the committee’s last major task on the bill.

Canada’s Ambassador to the United States, Michael Kergin, urged Congress Wednesday to reject the Alaska pipeline route restrictions that were approved last week by the Energy Conference Committee as part of the energy bill (see Daily GPI, Sept. 13). Speaking at RBC Financial Group’s Distinguished Speakers Series at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, DC, the ambassador also expressed Canada’s opposition to proposed subsidies for Alaskan gas production. A vote on the subsidies and other tax-related provisions has been delayed by the committee.

Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) last Thursday urged fellow lawmakers crafting a comprehensive energy bill to place restrictions on what he called FERC’s “virtually unintelligible, 638-page” proposed rulemaking for a standard market design (SMD) in U.S. wholesale electricity markets.

Elizabeth Moler, former FERC chair and now senior vice-president at Exelon, last Wednesday urged the Commission to start providing some certainty in the area of regional transmission organization (RTO) formation, noting that several utilities are drawing a line in the sand on spending more money on RTO-related development until that certainty is offered.

Several frustrated Reliant Energy Inc. shareholders on Wednesday urged R. Steve Letbetter, chairman and CEO, to resign, insinuating during an annual meeting in Houston that the utility giant has deteriorated since Letbetter took over as CEO in 1999. Calls for his resignation, as well as others from Reliant’s executive team, were not submitted to a formal vote, and Letbetter did not answer questions about whether the company would be in better shape without him at the helm.