On September 9, 2020, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit (“First Circuit”) affirmed the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts (“District Court”)  dismissal of a lawsuit alleging Eversource Energy and Avangrid (“Defendants”) manipulated Algonquin Gas Transmission, LLC (“Algonquin”) pipeline capacity and violated federal and state antitrust laws. The First Circuit followed its previous decision addressing a lawsuit challenging the same conduct by Defendants, but brought by different plaintiffs…

On September 1, 2020, FERC issued an order overturning 40 years of Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 (“PURPA”) precedent and revoking the qualifying facility (“QF”) status of Broadview Solar, LLC (“Broadview Solar”) after finding that it could not rely on inverters to meet PURPA’s statutory size limit. In a separate QF matter, the Supreme Court of the State of Montana (“Montana Supreme Court”) issued an opinion on August 24, 2020 finding the Montana…

On August 28, 2020, FERC issued a supplemental Notice of a Commission-led Technical Conference on state pricing for carbon dioxide emissions, commonly referred to as carbon pricing, in FERC-jurisdictional wholesale electric markets (“Conference”). The Conference is free and will take place online on Wednesday, September 30, 2020 from 9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. EST. The Conference will address the specifics for state-adoption mechanisms for carbon pricing in regions that have Commission-jurisdictional organized wholesale electricity markets.…

On August 27, 2020, FERC directed further briefing and established a technical conference in the proceedings arising from two complaints in which American Electric Power Service Corporation (“AEP”) and the City of Prescott, Arkansas each alleged that they were subject to overlapping or duplicative congestion charges on load that is pseudo-tied out of the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, Inc. (“MISO”) into Southwest Power Pool, Inc. (“SPP”). FERC’s August 27 order responded to additional briefing by…

On July 17, 2020, FERC issued three orders relating to the executed cost-of-service agreement (“Mystic Agreement”) among Constellation Mystic Power, LLC (“Mystic”), Exelon Generation Company, LLC (“Exelon”), and ISO New England Inc. (“ISO-NE”).  The Mystic Agreement provides for cost-of-service compensation to Mystic for the continued operation of two gas-fired generating units.  In the first two orders, FERC addressed requests for rehearing of its 2018 orders accepting the Mystic Agreement (the “July 2018 Order” and the…

On July 23, 2020, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (“D.C. Circuit”) granted FERC’s motion for a ninety-day stay of the court’s mandate in Allegheny Defense Project v. FERC. In Allegheny, the D.C. Circuit rejected FERC’s long-used practice of issuing “tolling orders” to grant itself more time to consider requests for rehearing (see July 1, 2020 issue of the WER). On July 6, 2020, FERC moved to stay…

On July 22, 2020, FERC approved a mitigation proposal that Sun Jupiter Holdings, LLC (“Sun Jupiter”) and El Paso Electric Company (“El Paso”) (together, “Applicants”) submitted in response to FERC’s March 30, 2020 order (“March 2020 Order”) conditioning approval of Sun Jupiter’s merger with and into El Paso and requiring the Applicants to address the transaction’s adverse impact on competition in certain circumstances. FERC also dismissed, on procedural grounds, United States Senators Jeffrey A. Merkley…