By Suzanne Herel
FERC last week denied Champion Energy Marketing’s request for a $3.1 million refund in PJM uplift charges related to the polar vortex of January 2014 (EL15-46).
Texas-based Champion, a load-serving entity, paid about $3.8 million in real-time balancing operating reserve (BOR) charges that it said it should not have been assessed because it had covered nearly 100% of its load for that month through forward contracts. Champion requested a refund of $3.1 million plus interest. The retail energy provider, a Calpine company, operates in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey and Maryland in PJM.
It also asked that Tariff provisions governing BOR charges and allocations be amended, saying they were unjust and unreasonable “because it allocates BOR costs for reliability to all load when these costs should be allocated to market participants that were short supply.”
The commission disagreed. “Despite the fact that Champion was long on an aggregate daily basis, as a load-serving entity with real-time load, Champion participates with other customers as part of an integrated grid and therefore relies on PJM to assure that its transactions can be delivered as scheduled,” it said.
Commissioner Philip Moeller dissented in part. “Allowing PJM’s current BOR cost allocation to continue harms market participants like Champion and decreases the efficiency of PJM’s markets. Allocating costs broadly to load-serving entities like Champion unfairly frustrates their efforts to hedge their positions; it does not ensure that the market participants who actually caused those uplift costs pay corresponding charges.
“The fact that Champion benefits from grid reliability does not indicate that their actions caused the uplift costs it was forced to bear,” he continued. “Champion and other load-serving entities should only be allocated uplift costs on the basis of those benefits when the parties who caused those costs cannot be identified.”
PJM said its operators responded appropriately to the extreme weather conditions and accompanying outages and that Champion’s charges were consistent with the Tariff and how other LSEs were assessed.
It did note that Champion was allocated $2.8 million in real-time BOR reliability charges in January 2014 incurred as a result of actions taken by PJM’s operators during the operating day that were “uneconomic but nonetheless needed to maintain the reliability of the PJM transmission system because physical, real-time load benefitted from the reliability provided by these operator decisions.”
Uplift payments for all of 2014 totaled $964.7 million, according to the Independent Market Monitor’s State of the Market report.
PJM acknowledged there was room for improvement in reducing uplift but pointed out that it was able to capture 98.1% of all system operating costs in 2014, leaving only 1.9% for BOR charges.
The Independent Market Monitor agreed that Champion’s request should be denied but said the company did have a legitimate grievance that indicated the need for further reform of capacity market rules.