Harvard's Ari Peskoe argues FERC can reach PJM's filing rights itself
Serguey Asael Shinder2 min readAri Peskoe of Harvard Law argues in a signed opinion piece published by Utility Dive on 23 September 2026 that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's jurisdiction over transmission governance allows it to modify filing-rights allocations and to adjust PJM Interconnection's nominating committee.
Filing rights are, in his framing, at the heart of how a regional transmission organisation works — they determine who may bring a proposed tariff change to FERC in the first place.
⚠️ This is an opinion column by a named academic, not a commission action. Nothing has been proposed, docketed or decided. We are reporting an argument about what FERC could do.
What it means
Filing rights are the quiet centre of RTO politics, and that is exactly why the piece is worth reading. Under the Federal Power Act, FERC reviews what is filed with it; it does not generally write tariffs from scratch. So whoever holds the right to file effectively holds the right to set the agenda — a stakeholder body that cannot file can pass whatever resolutions it likes and still never reach the Commission.
The argument being made is therefore not about any particular market rule. It is that the allocation of procedural power inside PJM is itself jurisdictional, and can be changed by the regulator rather than only by the governed. If that is right, a long-standing answer to reform proposals — that the RTO's own stakeholder process must produce them first — becomes optional.
📌 Whether it is right is a legal question we are not in a position to settle, and the piece is an advocate's case rather than a neutral survey. The reason to note it is that the governance question in PJM is increasingly where the load-growth fights end up, and an argument that FERC can act without waiting for consensus changes who has to be persuaded.