The Rules of the Grid: Transmission Policy and Motives Gehind It

 

Making sense of RTO Week, the mediation talks, and FERC's promised new rulemaking.

Dynegy's senior vice president Peter Esposito didn't think much about the celebrated mediation talks on forming a single, unified transmission grid for the Northeast U.S.

"We spent 45 days talking about process," he said. "We never got to specifics. FERC needs to step up to the plate and tell the RTOs what to do."

Yet that may be just what FERC Chairman Pat Wood has in store.

Just two weeks after he had brought the curtain down on RTO Week, ending the marathon five-day workshop (Oct. 15-19) on the fundamentals of operations and markets for electric transmission at his new-look Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Wood was still searching for answers to help him issue the sort of detailed instructions that Esposito and Dynegy longed for.

And, as if not fully satisfied with the ideas that came out of the workshop, Wood on Oct. 30 took the unusual step of lifting the Nov. 5 due date for comments, and asking the industry yet one more time to weigh in with suggestions on how to restructure the electric transmission sector. That set the stage for what was widely expected to be a new, improved, second-chance notice of proposed rulemaking (NOPR) on regional transmission organizations (RTOs). Those new rules, to come out as early as November or December, would set out a clear blueprint of how an RTO should behave.