Recently in FERC Category

Is there any other universe in which people talk about non-zero-dollar penalties?

A zero-dollar penalty requires enough thought process, thank you. It just seems like too much work to parse a sentence about a non-zero-dollar anything. Power system reliability is already hard enough.

If a hedge fund doesn't hire Brian Hunter, the former Amaranth Advisors trader who helped blow up the fund to the tune of $6.5 billion when his calendar-spread bets went south, some university should probably hire him as a professor.

On the witness stand this week at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's hearing on his alleged market manipulation (the trades in question had nothing to do with the fund's later collapse), Hunter has taken the room to Brian's School of Gas Futures Trading.

Insouciant? FERC? The 7th Circuit US Court of Appeals has said so, and it makes for a delightful picture. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission as a Parisian devil-may-care, stirring in some of us a vague, sweet longing for a summer of lazy ripostes on the Left Bank.

The Chicago court didn't describe FERC as an insouciant agency, of course. But its refreshingly plain-English opinion on August 6 did apply "insouciance" to the approach FERC took to approving PJM Interconnection members' chosen method of sharing the cost of building new extra-high-voltage transmission lines.

Applying a PJM-wide pro rata cost allocation the way FERC did it is just not OK, two of the three judges said in a ruling that appears to have thrown a pall of uncertainty over transmission investment.

This is certainly different. But what shouldn't be different, in this unusually challenging time? At the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the new head of external affairs is Julia Bovey, late of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Previously she was at the Conservation Law Foundation.

There's no reason a FERC external affairs chief should not come from the environmental community; external affairs is external affairs, and handling constituent groups and the media is a transferable skill. It just probably hasn't happened before at FERC, and it must reflect new Chairman Jon Wellinghoff's long-evident interest in seeing the energy industry transform itself by efficiency and renewables.

An entirely new agency to regulate the carbon allowance trading program, assuming there is one, would be far better than having existing US agencies deal with it, according to Suedeen Kelly, a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The task of regulating the market would be so daunting that it would dwarf an existing agency's mission, she said today at an ICF International energy breakfast in Washington. She also said she hasn't found a taker for her suggestion.

The Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill would charge FERC with overseeing cash carbon allowance and offset markets, while a White House plan would delegate responsibility for carbon derivatives markets to an agency that stakeholders expect to be the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. But "if I were master of the universe," Kelly said, "I'd create a new entity that that would be their sole job, because I believe that is going to be a huge undertaking."