Dive Brief:
- Clean energy trade groups, the Sierra Club and others last week urged the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to reverse its decision approving the Southeast Energy Exchange Market.
- “SEEM is not a properly functioning market, but rather is a discriminatory, closed-access pooling arrangement,” Advanced Energy United, the Clean Energy Buyers Association and the Solar Energy Industries Association said in a joint reply brief filed with FERC on Thursday.
- Last year, SEEM, a real-time market launched in late 2022, produced $3.7 million in reported benefits and had $4.3 million in administrative costs, cleared 704,000/MWh, or 0.1% of the region’s annual demand, and no non-utilities appear to have participated in it, according to the groups. “If that is sufficient to pass muster as a competitive, open-access market in the Commission’s current view, then Order No. 888 is currently on life support,” they said.
Dive Insight:
Following an appeals court ruling, FERC is reconsidering its approval of SEEM, a real-time market that includes Dominion Energy South Carolina, Duke Energy Carolinas, Georgia Power, and 20 other participants.
The agency launched a briefing process in June, seeking comments on whether SEEM is a “loose power pool” and whether its geographic limitations for members violate the open access principles of FERC Order 888.
The SEEM proposal remains just, reasonable and not unduly discriminatory or preferential, according to SEEM participants.
“SEEM serves an important purpose, facilitating intra-hour transactions that use otherwise unused transmission across [a 10-state] region to achieve lower rates for customers,” they said in an Aug. 13 brief at FERC. “Rules for participation in SEEM are open and non-discriminatory, limited only by issues of technical feasibility. All similarly situated customers are treated the same, including the SEEM members, who take service on the same terms and conditions, and at the same rates, as anyone else.”
However, SEEM opponents contend that the market is an exclusionary power pool.
“No matter what euphemisms and excuses the utilities advance to recharacterize SEEM and its technical limitations, it remains an unlawful power pool,” the opponents, including Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a joint reply brief. “In plain contravention of Order No. 888, SEEM provides the region’s monopoly utilities highly favorable transmission terms while denying them to non-participants, further concentrating the utilities’ market power and harming their ratepaying customers.”
The market lacks any participation from independent power producers, a sign of harmful market exclusion, the groups said.
“The addition of these low marginal cost resources would provide significant cost savings for the region by displacing the utilities’ high-cost and/or slow-ramping resources, which would increase the paltry benefit numbers that SEEM has produced to this point,” the groups said.
FERC should find that SEEM violates Order 888 and is therefore illegal under the Federal Power Act, according to the Southern Renewable Energy Association.
“SEEM is a loose power pool that violates applicable law, discriminates against renewable energy, and does not provide net-benefits to customers,” the group said.
SEEM participants include Southern Co. subsidiaries Alabama Power, Georgia Power and Mississippi Power; Associated Electric Cooperative, Inc.; Dalton Utilities; Dominion Energy South Carolina; Duke Energy Carolinas, Duke Energy Florida and Duke Energy Progress; JEA; Louisville Gas & Electric and Kentucky Utilities; North Carolina Municipal Power Agency Number 1; Power South Energy Cooperative; North Carolina Electric Membership; Tampa Electric; Tennessee Valley Authority; Georgia System Operations; Georgia Transmission; Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia; Oglethorpe Power; Seminole Electric Cooperative; and South Carolina Public Service Authority.
