NEW ORLEANS — Two panelists on either side of the Southeast Energy Exchange Market (SEEM) argument used several basketball references in debating how the nascent market will work in practice during the Gulf Coast Power Association’s MISO South-SPP conference.

SEEM will facilitate sub-hourly, bilateral transactions at a zero-transmission rate. Bordering the MISO and SPP footprints and with 16 member utilities, it’s set to go live in October.

The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy’s research director Maggie Shober said her concern is SEEM members can pick and choose whom they transact with, effectively blocking out some independent power producers and that it discriminates access to transmission service.

SACE’s Maggie Shober | © RTO Insider LLC

“We aren’t seeing this as a driver to new renewables. We see this as a potential air ball,” she said, working in a March Madness reference as a nod to the Final Four games being held down the street at the Superdome.

Corey Sellers, Southern Company’s general manager of transmission policy, said the member companies don’t have an incentive to block certain transactions. “The incentive is to have this [market] as active as possible to drive down costs,” he said.

Sellers said interested participants are seeking a “low-cost, low-bureaucracy approach” to the market. He said it will cost about $5 million to stand up the market and about $2 million to $3 million annually to maintain it.

“We think it’s a rather elegant approach to modifying the Southeastern market,” Sellers said.

Southern is a founding member of SEEM. Other members include Duke, Dominion, Associated Electric Cooperative, Inc., LG&E and KU Energy, Santee Cooper and the Tennessee Valley Authority.

FERC recently rejected more attempts by environmental, clean energy and community groups to overturn both its approval of SEEM and its orders to implement the market. Some of those groups have also filed an appeal in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, asking the court to prevent SEEM’s creation. (See FERC Again Rejects Efforts to Overturn SEEM.)

SEEM’s footprint would be about the size of MISO, extending from Springfield, Mo., to Savannah, Ga., Sellers said.

Shober said she is worried about the market’s “opaqueness.” She said SEEM will lack the transparency of an RTO wholesale market.

“Once it goes live, it will be hard for us to even know what’s going on in the market,” she said, likening the situation to holding a basketball game without media coverage. “How would the public feel about that? ‘Here’s the winner of your NCAA tournament, and just trust us that it happened this way.’”

Sellers said that while SEEM won’t publish real-time pricing, it does plan to share certain hourly statistics, such as megawatt amounts traded. He said the market might publish average weighted prices from the prior trading day.

“The output is a set of bilateral transactions,” he explained, adding that there wouldn’t be uniform pricing.

Sellers said he wasn’t yet sure if SEEM is the end goal, but that it’s a way to raise a market quickly and realize benefits while keeping conversations open about the future.

But Shober said SEEM is missing several design features that could allow it to transition smoothly into an energy imbalance market or an RTO.

“SEEM is not seeming to be designed in that way to take those steps forward,” she said. She likened the market to a “high school JV squad” when it could be a high-performing college team.

Sellers said SEEM represents the best way to make market transactions and possibly save millions without disturbing the members’ current constructs.

“Now, are we a fast-break team? Probably not,” he said.

“JV might have been a bit of a low blow,” Shober responded.