The membership of the Southeast Energy Exchange Market has grown by two after the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued a Dec. 30 order approving the participation of Tampa Electric and Duke Energy Florida.
The order approved the two companies to join SEEM on Jan. 1. They will join 19 other member entities, including two other Duke Energy subsidiaries.
In an October press release announcing that Duke Energy Florida along with JEA, Seminole Electric Cooperative and TECO Energy had signed agreements with SEEM to join the market, SEEM said that with the addition of those companies, participation had grown to include 23 entities which provide more than 180,000 MW of summer capacity.
Opponents of SEEM had objected to the expansion on the basis of “provisions of SEEM concerning market power, governance, access to transmission, market monitoring, and impacts on independent power producers and consumers” and urged FERC to reject the filings because they find the SEEM agreement itself “unjust, unreasonable and unduly discriminatory.”
FERC declined to consider these arguments, saying that they were outside the scope of the new member filings as the objections pertain to the structure of SEEM itself.
In a dissenting opinion, Commissioner Allison Clements expanded on her prior dissents to SEEM expansions and wrote that the filings in question “suffer from the exact same deficiencies that rendered incorporation of [Non-Firm Energy Exchange Transmission Service (NFEETS)] into the existing SEEM Members’ tariffs unjust and unreasonable and unduly discriminatory.”
Clements wrote that she was dissenting for the same reason she had dissented to the initial approval of SEEM’s launch in November – she believes that the market’s tariff provisions for member companies violate FERC’s Order No. 888 “because they restrict access to a transmission service.”
She said that the market hinders open access to transmission by allowing member companies veto power over which other companies can join a market platform that allocates transmission services.
“NFEETS is only available to SEEM participants, and participation in SEEM is not open,” Clements said. “Rather, a prospective participant must, among other things, execute enabling agreements with three counterparties who are already SEEM participants, and obtain the countersignature of the Participant Agreement by the SEEM Agent, who is controlled by an Operating Committee composed of SEEM Members.”
