The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission last week rejected a request to hold a technical conference to review the impact of the commission’s November 2013 order allowing the sharing of non-public operational information between interstate gas pipelines and electric transmission providers.
The commission said (RM13-17-001) that while it invites feedback on the effectiveness of the new communications standards in Order 787, there was no need for a technical conference requested by the Natural Gas Supply Association (NGSA).
FERC also rejected a request by Enable Gas Transmission LLC and Enable Mississippi River Transmission LLC to revise Order 787’s no-conduit rule, which prohibits recipients of non-public operational information from disclosing the information to a third party.
Order 787 allows interstate pipelines such as Enable to seek a waiver of the no-conduit rule if the fact that they share operational employees with local distribution companies (LDCs) or other affiliates makes compliance difficult.
Enable said that under the pre-Order 787 rules, employees its interstate pipelines share with their intrastate and gathering affiliates were already being exposed to sensitive non-public, operational information as part of their regular activities without ill-effect. Enable asked the commission to revise the rule to allow disclosures to third parties, other than marketing function employees, for reliability and planning.
But the commission ruled that “rather than attempting to craft a generic regulation, the best course would be to proceed on an individual case-by-case basis through waivers.” The commission noted that it had received only three waiver requests to date and had granted all of them (the Enable pipelines, National Fuel Gas Supply Corp. and Empire Pipeline Inc.).
“As demonstrated by these orders, we find that the waiver process is a reasonable means … to address compliance issues involving shared employees,” the commission said.
Enable’s waiver order (RP14-453) allows employees shared by Enable pipelines and their affiliated intrastate and gathering systems to receive non-public operational information as long as they don’t take part in marketing functions or share it with workers in those functions.
