There’s a ritual most third Thursdays of the month among the FERC watchers on #energytwitter.

When 10 a.m. comes and goes without the commissioners taking their seats around their semicircular dais, the stakeholders who attend the monthly open meetings in person continue their schmoozing. But for those watching via the commission’s webcast, it provokes critiques of the hold music and sarcastic comments about how the commission is late — again.

FERC meetings have often started after the advertised 10 a.m., but they reached new tardiness levels during the two years of Richard Glick’s chairmanship, inspiring one civic-minded FERC watcher to launch a Twitter account earlier this year, FERCStartTime. (“Solely dedicated to announcing the ACTUAL start time of FERC’s monthly open meeting. I listen to the looped hold music so you don’t have to.”)

According to an RTO Insider analysis of FERC meetings since January 2010, FERC meetings began an average of almost 42 minutes late during the two years of Glick’s chairmanship — by far the longest of the seven FERC chairs during that period. Glick may be chairing his final meeting Thursday after failing to win a hearing on his renomination. (See Glick’s FERC Tenure in Peril as Manchin Balks at Renomination Hearing.)

Former Chairs Norman Bay, Cheryl LaFleur and Kevin McIntyre were relatively prompt, starting their meetings on average within six minutes or less of the scheduled start. Neil Chatterjee, Jon Wellinghoff and James Danly were on average 12 to 29 minutes late.

Glick and Danly also hold the top spots when ranked by median tardiness (33 and 30 minutes, respectively). Wellinghoff’s tardiness drops from an average of 18.9 minutes to a median of 5, while Bay’s drops from an average of 6.3 to a median of 1 and Chatterjee from an average of 11.8 to a median of 8.

RTO Insider’s analysis is based on transcripts of 133 meetings since January 2010. Seven meetings were canceled during that period, one because of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 and six because of a lack of quorum in 2017. Transcripts were not posted for three meetings and could not be located. The analysis reflected rescheduled start times on a few occasions when meetings were delayed because of inclement weather and protester disruptions.

In interviews, former FERC staffers cited increased partisanship, the challenges of remote work during the pandemic, and the increasing public profile of the commission and the issues facing it for the increased delays.

Wellinghoff said “a chairman should make every reasonable effort to start meetings on time,” and lamented that one nearly three-hour delay had inflated his average. He said he could not recall the reason for the delay.

Glick, Bay and LaFleur declined to comment this week. Danly did not respond to requests for comment. McIntyre died in 2019.

Chatterjee, now a senior adviser at law firm Hogan Lovells, said the delays have increased in part because the meetings “have become really scripted affairs.”

“This is a conversation that I’ve actually had with a number of former chairs and commissioners that in the 80s, and 90s, in particular, and even in the early 2000s, the open meetings were kind of freewheeling debates,” Chatterjee said.

“What is happening now is — quite frankly, for strategic purposes — dissenting commissioners are withholding their separate opinions until the very last moment, and then … the chair and the majority has to then amend the order to account for some of the arguments being made in the dissenting opinions, and then amend their statements.”

Glick ‘Embarrassed’

At a press conference following the commission’s May 19 meeting, which started only 19 minutes late, Glick acknowledged he’s “sometimes … embarrassed when we don’t start on time.”

“I would love to sit here and tell you that [the May 19 start] means that we’re always going to be on time or at least close to on time,” said Glick. “But every commission meeting is different. Every set of orders that we have to consider are different. Sometimes there’s late negotiations between offices; [sometimes] we have difficult decisions we have to talk through with other offices. … The items that were on the agenda today [lent] themselves towards enabling us to start earlier.”

FERCStartTime, which began tracking the meetings in May, now has more than 150 followers, a who’s who of #energytwitter, including LaFleur; former Commissioner Phil Moeller; Glick’s chief of staff, Pamela Quinlan; analyst Christine Tezak, Harvard Law School’s Ari Peskoe; former Montana Public Service Commissioner Travis Kavulla; and Todd Snitchler, CEO of the Electric Power Supply Association.

It is “the most passive aggressive account on all of #energytwitter,” tweeted Joe Daniel, a manager in RMI’s Carbon-Free Electricity Practice.

What Goes On

So what’s happening on the 11th floor of FERC headquarters while we’re listening to “Man in the Mirror” for the third time?

Jeffrey Dennis, who recently left Advanced Energy Economy for the Department of Energy’s Grid Deployment Office, saw the process first-hand between 2010 and 2015, when he headed the Office of Policy Development and served as an aide to Commissioner John Norris.

“I think that what’s going on is that there are continued efforts to try to reach compromises [and] ensure that the language that the commission is voting on is ultimately what folks have agreed to — whatever compromises they’ve made — or that they’re giving the commissioners sufficient time to know what’s [included in] a vote … so that when they make their comments at the open meeting, they’re well informed, and they’re not making comments on something that perhaps was struck out of an order,” Dennis said.

“It did happen less often [in the past]. And I think that speaks to [the fact that] we certainly are seeing more separate statements, more orders that don’t have unanimity than we did … 15 years ago. That in some ways is a recognition of how much more difficult and controversial a lot of the issues the commission has before it are and the work it takes really to tackle these big issues,” Dennis continued. “The issues before FERC were always significant, but they are increasingly in the public eye. There does seem to be a bit more partisanship than there was before; I don’t want to [say on] every issue, but many.”

Grid Strategies President Rob Gramlich, who served as economic adviser to FERC Chair Pat Wood III from 2001 to 2005, said the remote work caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to the delays.

“It was always the case [that] we were negotiating orders right up to the last minute, so that’s not new,” he said. “You can get a lot more done when you’re physically there in person than when you’re all working off site. So I’m going to give the commission a pass for the last couple of years on that, because no previous commission ever had to negotiate final orders across five different offices and multiple staff offices from their homes all over the place.”

Larry Gasteiger, who worked 19 years at the commission (1997-2016) — including stints as legal adviser to Chair Joseph T. Kelliher and chief of staff to Chair Bay — said he sees a lack of discipline in the increasingly late starts.

“There was a lot of emphasis put on trying to resolve issues well in advance of the commission meeting so that we could essentially put it to bed … if not the evening before, certainly the morning of the commission meeting,” said Gasteiger, now executive director of the trade group WIRES. “And it’s a lot of work. I don’t want to suggest that it’s easy to accomplish that. It’s not. It’s really hard.

“Frankly, though, it does depend on the cooperation of all of the commissioners. I think we were lucky in the sense that the commissioners, at the time I was there, were really focused on trying to get the items ready so that the commission meeting could start on time,” he added. “It shows a level of respect for all of the … stakeholders who are interested in watching the meetings. … Once it starts to run into one or two hours later, that’s a lot of people sitting around waiting for commission meeting to start.”

Gasteiger acknowledged the commission’s tardiness has become a running joke on Twitter.

“But the joke’s getting kind of tired, frankly. And I just think the commission needs to get its act together. And I don’t point to the chairman only on this. All the commissioners need to be working on getting the meeting started promptly and on time. It can be done. It was done regularly for many, many years.”

It remains to be seen whether a new chairman will have any more success at on-time meetings. But one thing is certain: Since FERC moved its webcasts to YouTube, remote viewers can no longer hear playlists compiled by commissioners or commission offices while waiting for the meetings to start because of royalty issues.

“YouTube is very strict on that,” said FERC spokeswoman Mary O’Driscoll. “You have to be in the commission meeting room to hear the hold music.”