By Hudson Sangree
FERC said Thursday it won’t reconsider NYISO’s decision to deny membership to the successor to a bankrupt energy service company (ESCO) (EL19-39-001).
Light Power & Gas of NY (LPGNY) had sought rehearing of FERC’s June order upholding NYISO’s decision to exclude it from joining until its bankrupt predecessor, North Energy Power, paid its outstanding debts to the ISO. (See FERC Upholds NYISO Treatment of ESCO as Successor.)
NYISO expelled North Energy in October after the company filed for bankruptcy and its unpaid obligations exceeded its collateral.
LPGNY filed its application to join NYISO one week after North Energy’s membership was terminated. The two companies had the same principal personnel and had served or sought to serve the same customers in the same service territory, FERC noted.
In a conversation with a NYISO manager, one of the principals had “expressed a desire to get his customers back,” FERC said.
LPGNY argued NYISO had found incorrectly that it was North Energy’s successor and liable for its debts.
FERC disagreed. The commission looked to its own precedents after finding NYISO’s transmission tariff was “silent with respect to the question of whether two different limited liability companies with close ties can be treated as the same transmission customer,” it said.
“The commission found that the close overlap of LPGNY and North Energy presented circumstances in which NYISO’s treatment of LPGNY and North Energy as one transmission customer was reasonable,” FERC wrote.
In its rehearing request, LPGNY argued that the “starting point for tariff interpretation is determining whether the relevant tariff language is ambiguous, and that the commission never made a finding of ambiguity,” FERC said. “LPGNY contends that under [two prior FERC decisions] … the commission must declare tariff language ambiguous prior to relying on extrinsic evidence.”
FERC decided, however, that the silence of the NYISO tariff on whether closely related companies can be treated as the same transmission customer “is adequate to permit the commission to rely, as it did in the complaint order, on commission precedent and extrinsic evidence, in discerning the meaning” of the relevant section of NYISO tariff.