By Rory D. Sweeney and Rich Heidorn Jr.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday denied eight challenges to PJM’s controversial Capacity Performance market rules, potentially cementing fundamental changes to the RTO’s capacity market that critics believe were hastily enacted and unjustifiably increase costs (16-1234).

CP was implemented following a blackout scare in January 2014 when the polar vortex dipped unusually low across the northern U.S. and created record-low temperatures. As much as 22% of PJM’s fleet failed to operate when dispatched, despite being contracted through the capacity market.

The new rules introduced year-round performance requirements for capacity resources along with incentives to perform and steep penalties for failing to do so.

Critics of the new rules argued they would increase the cost to secure capacity by billions of dollars. After FERC approved the changes in June 2015, challengers petitioned the commission for a rehearing, which the commission denied.

Nine organizations challenged FERC’s denial in court. The ensemble is a somewhat unusual partnership of environmental groups (the Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club and Union of Concerned Scientists), representatives of utilities (the American Public Power Association, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association and the Public Power Association of New Jersey), the Advanced Energy Management Alliance, which represents demand response resources, American Municipal Power, which represents both utilities and resources, and the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities.

FERC’s Reasoning Upheld

The ruling by Judges A. Raymond Randolph, Janice Rogers Brown and David B. Sentelle was unanimous. The court ordered the clerk to withhold issuance of the mandate resulting from the ruling to give the plaintiffs time to file petitions for rehearing before the three-judge panel or the full court.

The court’s decision points out that FERC acknowledged the increased capacity costs but cited a study that estimated the new rules would create an annual net savings of potentially billions of dollars starting in 2016. The fact that the study used a penalty that was higher than FERC approved was immaterial, the court found.

“The savings come from the penalty successfully increasing reliability,” the court said in its decision. “Even with a lower penalty, the net savings may be substantial.”

FERC “does not have to find net savings” to approve proposed changes, the court found, and higher costs can be warranted if they increase reliability. FERC said the revisions would do that and also help avoid energy price spikes.

Year-Round Resource Requirement

PJM’s requirement that all CP resources be year-round attracted opposition from numerous groups.

NRDC, Sierra Club and UCS said that the requirement discriminated against seasonal generation such as wind and solar — despite the RTO’s offer that winter-only resources could aggregate with summer resources — because aggregation imposed “transactional costs.”

AMP, meanwhile, said aggregation should also be open to traditional resources.

The judges said none of the challenges persuaded them to question the commission’s judgment. “The commission’s policy decision to assess reliability through a year-round capacity commitment is the type of policy judgment to which we afford deference, and that deference is justified by the record,” they said. “The law provides no basis to claim the commission cannot approve uniform performance requirements simply because those requirements will be easier to satisfy for some generators than for others.”

Demand Response

AEMA had problems with CP’s impact on DR, challenging PJM’s proposal to use separate formulas for calculating expected consumption during summer months and non-summer months.

The group said it supported the “peak load contribution” method for the summer, which is based on a DR customer’s contribution to the five hours of the previous year when systemwide demand peaked. It opposed the “customer baseline load” method for non-summer months, which is based on the customer’s contribution to the system’s load for the four days of peak systemwide load during the most recent 45 days.

“Because it was reasonable for the commission to accept PJM’s proposal to use the recent-peak method for non-summer months and any alleged departure from past practice was adequately explained, we defer to the commission’s determination on this issue,” the court said.

AEMA Executive Director Katherine Hamilton said the court rebuff means consumers will face reduced choices and higher prices because residential DR and renewable resources “could be forced out of the market altogether.”

“In the recent auction, the amount of demand resources — both offered and cleared — fell by thousands of megawatts compared with previous years. PJM has now effectively ceded jurisdiction for monetizing these competitive products in the capacity markets, and it will be up to state commissions located in PJM to determine how these products will be operated going forward,” she said in a statement. “As AEMA considers legal options moving forward, we will continue working within the PJM stakeholder process on wholesale competitive market issues and with state commissions on demand response solutions for consumers.”

Procedural Challenge

The court also rejected challenges by APPA, NRECA and PPANJ to PJM’s filing of proposed changes to the capacity market under Federal Power Act Section 205 and its simultaneous Section 206 complaint proposing replacements for energy market rules it said were no longer just and reasonable.

PJM could not file changes to the Operating Agreement under Section 205 because it did not seek stakeholder approval of the changes.

The public power groups argued that the commission could not accept PJM’s Section 205 filing as just and reasonable while simultaneously finding that the filing rendered the Operating Agreement unjust and unreasonable under Section 206. “In effect, FERC found that PJM had created the factual premise and legal basis for FERC to order a change in rates that PJM could not have unilaterally made,” the groups said. “This bootstrapping of results is impermissible.”

The court said the petitioners failed to “explain why PJM’s Section 205 filings regarding the capacity market necessarily must complement existing energy market agreements to be just and reasonable” and cited “no precedent for their theory that the commission was required to act ‘under Section 206 alone.’”

“We therefore see no reason why the commission was not entitled to approve changes under Section 206 in anticipation of the impacts of the Section 205 filing rather than wait for those impacts to be realized,” the court ruled.

Penalties Too Low

PPANJ and the New Jersey BPU contended the CP penalties for resources that fail to meet their capacity commitments during an emergency hour were too low to ensure performance.

The commission approved a penalty rate equal to one-thirtieth of the net cost of new entry per megawatt-hour of shortage. The petitioners said the 30-hour denominator — based on the number of emergency hours in 2013-2014 — was too high, resulting in a penalty that was too low.

“The commission had good reason to conclude that the formula results in a high enough penalty to encourage resources to meet their capacity commitments,” the judges said. “The commission decided the penalty was also low enough to avoid introducing ‘excessive risk’ into the capacity market. Too high a penalty could discourage even reliable resources from entering the market. We defer to the commission’s balancing of these competing concerns.”

Default Offer Cap

Also rejected was a complaint by the BPU and four organizations representing utilities that PJM’s default offer cap, meant to reflect the CP penalties and bonuses, is too high. PJM would only include an offer above the cap in the capacity auction if it determines it is cost-based.

The court rejected complaints the cap could increase capacity costs, saying “increased capacity prices are necessary” to encourage entry of new, reliable resources. “Resource owners need to be able to offer capacity at a higher price in order to recover the costs of improvements,” it said.

Unit-Specific Constraints

AMP challenged the imposition of penalties on CP resources that fail to perform because of unit-specific constraints, saying it was inconsistent with energy market rules, which require PJM to cover resources’ costs if it schedules the them to run outside of their parameter limits.

“Given the different purposes of the capacity market and the energy market, there is no inconsistency in treating the operating-parameter limitations differently in the two markets,” the court said.