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At the annual Western Electricity Coordinating Council (“WECC”) Strategic Planning Session, held on September 6-7, 2012, the WECC Board of Directors took a first step towards separating WECC into two companies.  The proposed bifurcation would likely separate WECC’s North American Electric Reliability Corporation (“NERC”)-delegated governance functions from its functions on behalf of member entities, such as reliability coordination efforts and system planning.  The move is intended to address criticisms levied at WECC by both the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (“FERC”) and NERC.

On September 5, 2012, FERC approved Duke Energy Ohio, Inc.’s (“Duke Ohio”) proposed internal reorganization within the Duke Energy Corporation (“Duke”).  The primary purpose of the reorganization is to transfer Duke Ohio’s generation assets to other subsidiaries of Duke.  The internal reorganization is part of a comprehensive retail rate settlement approved by the Ohio Public Utilities Commission (“Ohio PUC”) in November 2011.

On September 5, 2012, Royal Dutch Shell plc (“Shell”) announced it would be moving forward with the Quest carbon capture and storage (“CCS”) project in the oil sands near northern Alberta, Canada (“Quest Project”).  The Quest Project will be the world’s first commercial-scale CCS project in the Canadian oil sands.  Shell will hold majority ownership in the Quest Project and will serve as the designer, builder, and operator of the CCS facility.

In an opinion issued August 27, 2012, the Ninth Circuit concluded that FERC has the authority to retroactively determine just and reasonable prices in order to establish refund amounts for jurisdictional entities, but does not have retroactive rate-setting authority over non-jurisdictional sellers.   

On August 27, 2012, FERC Commissioners Tony Clark and Phillip Moeller issued separate concurring opinions in an order regarding the results of ISO-New England, Inc.’s (“ISO-NE”) sixth Forward Capacity Auction.  In those concurrences, the two Commissioners urged Congress to take action to rectify conflicts between environmental regulations and reliability standards.

On July 27, 2012, the Department of the Interior (“DOI”) Bureau of Land Management (“BLM”) and the Department of Energy (“DOE”) announced the availability of the Final Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (“PEIS”) for solar energy development in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah in the Federal Register.

On July 22, 2012, NRG Energy, Inc. (“NRG”) and GenOn Energy, Inc. (“GenOn”) announced that the two companies intend to merge and operate under the name NRG Energy.  The companies claim that the merger, if completed, will create the nation’s largest competitive power generation company with approximately 47,000 MW serving the east, west, and Gulf Coast regions, and lead to $300 million in annual benefits in its first full year of operations.