PJM asks FERC to dismiss Mon Power's $145M Winter Storm Fern complaint
Victoria Shinder1 min readPJM Interconnection on 26 October asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to dismiss a complaint from Monongahela Power, a FirstEnergy subsidiary, seeking to recoup $145 million it lost during Winter Storm Fern, Utility Dive reports. Mon Power's complaint, filed on 6 October, asked FERC to investigate whether PJM exceeded or misused its advance-scheduling and commitment authority during the storm in late January and early February.
During Fern, PJM scheduled gas-fired units ahead of time instead of relying on its normal market process. According to Mon Power, PJM pre-scheduled more than 50,000 MW a day of gas-fired generation from 26 to 31 January and more than 45,000 MW on 1 February, against nearly 89,000 MW of gas capacity on its system at the end of last year. Mon Power, which serves about 400,000 customers in West Virginia, argues the practice inflated its costs.
PJM called the complaint "a fishing expedition without substance" and said the most obvious driver of the locational price differences Mon Power faced was downed power lines on the utility's own system. The PJM Power Providers Group and the Electric Power Supply Association said they sympathised with Mon Power but urged FERC to reject the complaint, arguing that retroactively rerunning or reallocating cleared markets would violate market finality and conflict with long-standing Commission precedent.
What it means
The dispute is about who bears the cost when a grid operator steps outside normal market rules in an emergency. Mon Power wants a rerun; PJM and the generators want the settled results to stand. A ruling for Mon Power would invite similar claims after every extreme-weather event, which is why the independent producers lined up against a utility they otherwise said they sympathised with.