“I think it will be a very positive thing
for all types of resources,” says former FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff.
The U.S. federal government took a snow day
on Monday. But the U.S. Supreme Court soldiered on, delivering its decision in
the case of Federal Energy Regulatory Commission vs. Electric Power Supply
Association.
In a 6-2 decision, the Supreme Court struck
down a lower
court opinion and ruled that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
(FERC) has the authority to regulate demand response.
FERC appealed to the Supreme Court in 2014
to reverse a lower
court ruling that vacated its Order 745, which calls for demand
response to be compensated like other generators in wholesale energy markets.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote the majority
opinion, with Justice Antonin Scalia filing the dissenting opinion along with
Justice Clarence Thomas. Justice Samuel Alito abstained.
The court ruled on two separate issues. The
more significant issue was whether FERC has the authority to regulate
demand-response participation in interstate wholesale markets.
FERC’s
Order 745, approved in 2012, calls for grid operators to pay the full
market price, known as the locational marginal price (LMP), to economic
demand-response resources in real-time and day-ahead markets as long as the
resource is cost-effective. Economic demand response is a very small portion of
the market compared to demand response in the capacity market.
FERC has the authority -- and, indeed, the
duty -- to ensure that rules or practices 'affecting' wholesale rates are just
and reasonable,” wrote Justice Kagan. “Taken for all it is worth, that
statutory grant could extend FERC’s power to some surprising places.” The court
concluded that demand response fell squarely within FERC’s regulatory scope
under the Federal Power Act.
“If rewarded at LMP, rather than at some
lesser amount, more demand response providers will enter more bids capable of
displacing generation, thus necessarily lowering wholesale electricity prices,”
the majority opinion added.
Jon Wellinghoff, former FERC chairman who
led the agency when Order 745 was created, was always confident FERC
would win at the Supreme Court. He said Monday’s decision paves the
way for far more resources of all sizes to play in wholesale markets.
“It will have a tremendous impact on
consumers to control their energy cost and provide a service to the wholesale
market,” said Wellinghoff. “It’s going to make consumers an equal participant
in the market in a way they never were before. That was the intention of Order
745, and that has been vindicated.”
The second and lesser issue was whether
FERC has the authority to regulate the rules on what markets will pay for
demand-response resources.
On that point -- which many in the industry
were unsure about -- the court also sided with the federal regulator.
“Our decisions uniformly speak about rates,
for electricity and all else, in only their most prosaic, garden-variety
sense,” Kagan wrote. “The commission, not this or any other court, regulates
electricity rates.”
The majority opinion ruled that FERC had
done its due diligence in setting the rate for economic demand response, but
acknowledged that it is a technical issue where both sides of the compensation
issue have some merit.
“We do not discount the cogency of EPSA’s
arguments in favor of LMP-G. Nor do we say that in opting for LMP instead, FERC
made the better call,” wrote Kagan.
Even though EPSA had compelling points in
its argument that demand response should be paid the LMP minus generation, the
court found its argument flawed. Demand response has to be regulated by some
entity, and EPSA’s reasoning could have left the resource in regulatory limbo.
“The upshot of EPSA’s view would be to extinguish
the wholesale demand response program in its entirety,” the court concluded.
Some generators want to dismantle demand
response entirely. A decision by the Supreme Court against FERC’s jurisdiction
would have threatened capacity markets, a much larger portion of the demand
response market.
After the lower court ruling in 2014,
FirstEnergy filed a complaint with FERC demanding that it force PJM to do
away with demand response as a resource altogether.
“It certainly gives them a blow,” said
Katherine Hamilton, executive director of Advanced Energy Management Alliance,
of FirstEnergy's campaign.
Wellinghoff did not mince words: “It
totally shuts down FirstEnergy,” he said. “That complaint no longer has any
validity.”
The decision by the Supreme Court on
jurisdiction is a setback to entities that are fighting
against demand response because they contend it erodes profit margins
of traditional generators.
In many states, however, demand-side
resources have become as important as generation. California, which has its own
independent system operator, has been testing out new
rules and regulations for incentivizing distributed energy resources,
including demand response.
New York, also with its own independent
system operator, is looking at new
business models that value demand-side resources like demand response.
The decision is not just a win for
large-scale demand response, said Wellinghoff, but also for resources at the
edge of the grid like solar and energy storage. “Consumers can fully play in
wholesale markets like a generator,” he said. “I think it will be a very
positive thing for all types of resources.”
No comments:
Post a Comment