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CH& Federal Energy Regulatory Commission

Seeking to Boost Energy Storage and Distributed Energy Aggregation, FERC Proposes Significant Changes to the Market Rules

December 2016 | Blog |

Last month, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (“FERC”) issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (“NOPR”) aimed at overcoming market barriers faced by emerging energy storage technologies as well as new technologies that allow aggregation and coordinated dispatch of small distributed energy resources. While the NOPR is limited to ISO and RTO markets, energy market participants in the Pacific Northwest would nonetheless be well advised to pay attention to the NOPR. This is true because the Energy Imbalance Market is expanding into the Northwest, which will effectively expand the footprint of the California ISO into this region. In addition, regulators in this region are likely to look to FERC for guidance on these emerging issues even if not strictly applicable in non-RTO regions.

Milestone in Transmission Regulation: U.S. Court of Appeals Upholds Order No. 1000

On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected a host of challenges to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (“FERC”) Order No. 1000, upholding the order in its entirety. As we’ve previously discussed, Order No. 1000 aims to create a level regulatory playing field for independent transmission developers, thus encouraging new sources of badly-needed investment in the nation’s transmission infrastructure.