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On March 24, 2010, the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee unanimously voted to forward the Grid Reliability and Infrastructure Defense (“GRID”) Act to full committee without any amendments.  The bipartisan bill would amend the Federal Power Act to give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (“FERC” or the “Commission”) authority to issue emergency orders for utilities to take protective action when the president declares a grid security “threat.”

On March 25, 2010, Central Transmission, LLC (“Central Transmission”) filed a complaint with FERC against PJM Interconnection, L.L.C. (“PJM”).  Central Transmission claims that PJM’s tariff is unjust, unreasonable and unduly discriminatory because it does not provide the same regulated, rate-based recovery provisions to new transmission developers as it does to incumbent Transmission Owners.   

On March 18, 2010, FERC found New York State Electric and Gas Corp. (“NYSEG) and Rochester Gas and Electric Corp. (“RG&E”) must continue to buy excess output from a cogeneration facility owned and operated by Cornell University (“Cornell”).  As such, FERC’s ruling marked the first time that FERC has determined that a large qualifying facility (“QF”) does not have nondiscriminatory access to markets, in the wake of legislative changes included in the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

On March 23, 2010, the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment held a hearing entitled “Oversight of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission” to examine how the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (“FERC” or the “Commission”) is implementing its statutory duties and authorities.  The four current FERC commissioners testified at the hearing and then responded to questions from subcommittee members, including questions about transmission planning and cost allocation.

On March 18, 2010, FERC issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (“NOPR”) proposing to improve competiveness in organized wholesale energy markets by compensating demand response resources (“DRRs”) based upon the Locational Marginal Price (“LMP”) in the appropriate Regional Transmission Organization (“RTO”) or Independent System Operator (“ISO”).

On March 18, 2010, FERC approved the North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s (“NERC”) plan to implement eight Critical Infrastructure Protection Reliability Standards, CIP-002-1 through CIP-009-1 (“CIP Standards”) by generator owners and operators of nuclear power plants in the United States (“Implementation Plan”).  NERC’s Implementation Plan was filed on January 19, 2010 as part of a compliance filing in response to FERC’s request for additional information on December 17, 2009.

On March 18, 2010, FERC approved Tres Amigas LLC’s (“Tres Amigas”) request to sell transmission service at negotiated rates, with conditions on anchor customers and initial capacity offerings. In a separate order, FERC declined the petition to disclaim jurisdiction over the transmission facilities that will interconnect the Tres Amigas project with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (“ERCOT”) transmission system in Texas.

In July 2009, Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman, (D-NM), introduced a bill, the “American Clean Energy Leadership Act,” which would allocate costs for new transmission and bar FERC from assigning the cost of a transmission project to a region or “sub-region” unless FERC can prove the costs are “reasonably proportionate to measureable economic and reliability benefits.”