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On October 31, 2025, FERC granted ISO New England’s (ISO-NE) request for a limited waiver of its Tariff and Billing Policy to refund, approximately $68,000 in Capacity Performance charges to Brookfield White Pine Hydro LLC (Brookfield).  The waiver relates to six five-minute intervals during a June 24, 2025 Capacity Scarcity Condition in which Harris Hydro Station’s Unit 2 (Harris 2) was manually held below its EcoMax[1] because ISO-NE allowed a non-commercial Large Generating Facility to operate on a constrained transmission line, thereby limiting Harris 2’s output and triggering an underperformance assessment.

On August 25, 2025, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (“FERC”) granted NextEra Duane Arnold, LLC (“NEDA”) a waiver of certain sections of the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, Inc.’s (“MISO”) tariff to use MISO’s generating facility replacement process for the recommissioning of the Duane Arnold nuclear power facility (“Project”) in Palo, Iowa. The order also extends the Project’s commercial operation date to December 31, 2029.

On July 11, 2025, the D.C. Circuit upheld PJM Interconnection L.L.C.’s (“PJM”) assessment of $12 million in penalties against Energy Harbor, LLC (“Energy Harbor”) for failing to perform when called upon by PJM during a major winter storm in December 2022. The D.C. Circuit held that PJM-approved maintenance at Energy Harbor’s coal-fired generation facility, the W.H. Sammis Plant (“Sammis Plant”), was not the sole cause of the Sammis Plant’s nonperformance, and therefore Energy Harbor was not excepted from penalties under PJM’s Open Access Transmission Tariff (“OATT”).

On April 29, 2025, FERC partially granted rehearing in the case of Cometa Energia, S.A. de C.V. (“Saavi”) against the California Independent System Operator Corporation (“CAISO”), finding a provision of CAISO’s Business Practice Manual for Reliability Requirements (“Business Practice Manual”) must be included in CAISO’s tariff under the “rule of reason,” as the provision significantly impacts rates and services. In its underlying complaint, Saavi argued that CAISO unlawfully terminated the deliverability status of its 181.5 megawatt generating unit (“Project”). In its rehearing order, FERC agreed that under the “rule of reason” CAISO should have reflected the deliverability status provision of its Business Practice Manual in its tariff, but FERC declined to reinstate the Project’s deliverability status citing concerns over reduced resource adequacy for other generating units.

On April 10, 2025, FERC addressed arguments on rehearing that clarified, but did not modify the outcome of, a November 1, 2024, order (“Rejection Order”) rejecting PJM Interconnection, L.L.C.’s (“PJM”) proposal to increase the co-located data center load at a Susquehanna Nuclear, LLC (“Susquehanna”) nuclear generating facility. FERC again found that PJM’s amended Interconnection Service Agreement’s (“ISA”) non-conforming provisions were not necessary deviations from the pro forma ISA. However, FERC did clarify that the Rejection Order did not prevent other entities from filing non-conforming ISAs to address issues relating to co-located data center load.

On September 12, 2024, FERC’s Chief Accountant issued a notice of proposed accounting release (“NOPAR”) to modify the transferability of income tax credits (“ITCs”) related to certain energy projects under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (“IRA”), which allows entities to monetize such ITCs via transfers to independent third parties…

On September 10 and 11, 2024, FERC staff held a two-day workshop at its headquarters in Washington, DC on opportunities to further refine the generator interconnection queue process. Panelists and FERC staff discussed potential enhancements to transmission planning and processing interconnection requests over the course of six panels on discrete…

On July 9, 2024, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (“D.C. Circuit”) vacated orders issued by the FERC that required six wholesale power sellers (the “Sellers”) to issue refunds to customers for power sales made above FERC’s “soft” price cap during the 2020 heatwave in California.  The court held that FERC “should have conducted [a] Mobile-Sierra analysis prior to ordering refunds,” and therefore remanded the orders so that FERC could “change its refund analysis for above-cap sales going forward.”

On June 28, 2024, the United States Supreme Court (“Supreme Court”) overruled its prior decision in Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council (“Chevron”) in a 6-3 vote in Loper Bright Enterprises et al. v. Raimondo, Secretary of Commerce, et al. (“Loper Bright”). The Chevron doctrine has required federal courts to defer to administrative agencies’ interpretations of statutes the agency administers when the underlying statute is ambiguous. Under the Loper Bright ruling, federal courts will not defer to administrative agencies in interpreting ambiguous statutes and instead must exercise their judgment in determining whether the agency acted within its statutory authority. The decision will likely have a substantial impact on both regulated industries and federal agencies such as FERC.

On May 23, 2024, FERC issued an Order denying Lackawanna Energy Center LLC’s (“Lackawanna”) complaint against PJM Interconnection, L.L.C. (“PJM”) alleging that PJM failed to reimburse Lackawanna for lost opportunity costs (“LOC”) incurred following allegedly improper curtailment orders from PJM during a 2023 transmission line outage.  Lackawanna argued that PJM’s curtailment of its generation output violated the Federal Power Act and the PJM Tariff, which typically allow for LOC payments when generator output is reduced due to transmission constraints or reliability issues.  FERC dismissed all claims raised in the complaint.