FERC Filings

MOTION TO INTERVENE AND PROTEST OF THE ELECTRIC POWER SUPPLY ASSOCIATION-Carolina Power & Light Company , Duke Energy Corporation, South Carolina Electric & Gas Company, GridSouth Transco, LLC - Docket No. RT01-74-000

2. Function 1: Tariff Administration—The Proposal Fails to Treat All Users Comparably and in a Nondiscriminatory Manner

The Applicants state that GridSouth will be the “sole provider of transmission service in the GridSouth region and will offer one-stop shopping for transmission service on a non-discriminatory basis.”12 However, “transmission service provided to Native Load Customers as part of their bundled service will continue to be paid for according to their pre-existing bundled rates and will not be subject to a separate transmission charge by GridSouth.”13 Accordingly, the GridSouth proposal fails to provide comparability to all users of the system and will continue to maintain the discrimination that exists against non-load serving entities.14

The focal point of the Commission’s comparability rule is the undue discrimination in the rates and services that the Applicants offer to third parties when compared to their own use of the transmission system. The transmission owners must treat other users the same as they treat themselves. The GridSouth proposal fails to do this. Accordingly, EPSA urges the Commission to reject the Applicants’ attempt to exclude their native load, including wholesale load, from the tariff.

Furthermore, generators who are or plan to develop merchant projects in the region controlled by the Applicants must contend with reservations of substantial transmission capacity by the Applicants. Purportedly, their actions are designed to serve native load or are intended to be a designation of “future resources.”15 Independent generators, however, are faced with an issue of timing – they generally are not able to identify customers before they build their facilities, so they cannot make the necessary reservation of transmission capacity, as both point-to-point and network service require an identification of customers.

But generators risk the unavailability of transmission capacity if they postpone identifying customers until after the facility is operational. This scenario places independent power producers at a distinct competitive disadvantage because the incumbent utilities in the GridSouth region are able to reserve transmission capacity for future resources and to accommodate load growth, while non-load serving entities cannot. If approved, the GridSouth proposal would perpetuate this competitive advantage in clear contravention of the Commission’s stated policies for non-discriminatory open access. Accordingly, EPSA urges the Commission to require the RTO OATT to provide comparability to all users of the transmission system and a level playing field with respect to the reservation of transmission capacity.

12 Filing, at 46.

13 Testimony of J. Stephen Henderson (Exhibit No.GS-1) at 7.

14 In its “Staff Report to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on the Bulk Power Markets in the United States, Part II,” the FERC staff reached some sound conclusions regarding the importance of comparability and placing all uses of the system on a single tariff: “Given that all transactions serve load of one sort or another, all load would be treated in the same manner. This would eliminate the current incentives that vertically integrated transmission owners have to favor their native load through the manner and method of calculating ATC and handling interconnection requests. It would also restore confidence among market participants that transmission owners were not calling TLRs to favor native load, because they would no longer have an incentive to do so.” at page 2-49.

15 Order No. 888 and the pro forma tariff have specific criteria for the designation of network resources.