By Amanda Durish Cook
FERC has dismissed NRG Power Marketing’s complaint alleging MISO’s 2013 revision of congestion pricing rendered the company’s financial transmission rights worthless (EL16-3).
The commission on Monday found NRG’s contentions “baseless.” It said the company would not have bid differently into a late 2013 FTR auction even if it were made aware of the change to MISO South’s commercial pricing nodes — revised as part of the region’s integration — ahead of time. The commission relied on MISO’s reporting that NRG entered the same number of megawatts into the auction as it did in the RTO’s later annual auction revenue rights nomination.
“That NRG’s nominations in the partial-year financial transmission right auction allocation were identical to the total number of megawatts for which it made nominations in the ensuing annual auction revenue rights nomination, as MISO states, undermines NRG’s claim that it would have bid differently … had it anticipated MISO’s actions,” FERC wrote.
NRG filed its complaint last October, claiming MISO told market participants it was consolidating commercial pricing nodes in MISO South into a single node only after it closed the bid window for the FTR auction.
NRG said this “effectively nullified the results of those FTR auctions and rendered the FTRs purchased by NRG through those auctions valueless,” according to FERC. The action, NRG argued, also nullified the results of the annual 2013 auction and October 2013 multi-period monthly auction.
MISO denied the allegations, arguing NRG failed to produce any evidence of unhedged congestion costs.
FERC said the consolidation wasn’t in violation of the MISO Tariff, and that the RTO provided adequate notice to market participants via a working group. NRG representatives participated in four stakeholder meetings on the topic ahead of the change, and FERC said a complaint should have been filed earlier.
The commission also noted that it was clear that FTRs would be valued differently in the integrated MISO South. “It is evident that pre-integration, FTRs with both sources and sinks in what would become MISO South are fundamentally different products, with different potential values, than post-integration FTRs with both sources and sinks in MISO South. NRG purchased the former but now seeks to be compensated for the potential value of the latter in the post-integration world,” FERC said.
