In response to a request from Staff, the Commission has decided to defer consideration of Delmarva's electric POR plan until its January 13, 2010, Administrative meeting. The Commission reasoned that, "the implementation of the purchase of receivable program without acceptance of an appropriate discount rate would be premature. Consequently, the Commission rescinds the requirement that Delmarva implement its purchase of receivables program by December 7, 2009. At the time that the Commission issues an order accepting the Revisions and establishing an effective date, it will direct a new date by which the purchase of receivables program shall be implemented by Delmarva." The Commission also directed Delmarva to respond to Staff data requests pertaining to its POR filing within five business days of the Order. The full text of the Order is available on the NEM Website.

The ALJs issued a ruling in NYSEG/RGE's rate cases pertaining the utilities' request for confidential treatment of certain discovery responses. Specifically, the information the utilities sought to protect pertained to work papers and exhibits that incorporated in a spreadsheet-based model they used to forecast their monthly cost of gas for 2009, 2010 and 2011, including model inputs for gas commodity costs, pipeline transportation and storage charges, financial hedging costs, and system throughput, and the calculations by which the inputs are combined to produce the weighted average monthly and annual gas cost forecasts. The ALJs denied the request for confidential status of the information but granted it restricted status from disclosure.

The ALJs reasoned that, "First, the assertion that knowledge of the utilities' commodity costs and hedging practices could enable marketers to change their own hedging and pricing practices to the detriment of consumers is completely unsupported by any information establishing a link between the knowledge and the harm. Certainly, it is hard to imagine that marketers stand to gain anything by deliberately setting their prices above those of the Companies, and if they deliberately set them lower, it is difficult to see how that is harmful to their customers.

It is equally unclear how it would be harmful to customers or competition for marketers to have a better sense of when to actively pursue new business and when not. One would expect sales to pick up when marketers are able to offer good prices to customers, and to tail off when they cannot. That is fairly fundamental to all price-based competition.

Finally, the argument that marketers participating in this proceeding and receiving responses to information requests will 'unfairly gain a competitive advantage' over those who do not, is simply wrong. If marketers who expend time and resources participating in these cases are able to learn of public information that non-participating marketers may not know about, any competitive advantage they gain from their efforts is fairly earned. This is no different than the advantage gained by a marketer who reads and studies utilities' tariffs over those who do not. Our obligation is to assure that our proceedings are open to all interested parties. It is not our responsibility, nor is it consistent with the requirements of FOIL or with support for competitive markets, for us to deny information to parties who actively seek it just because those parties have competitors who may not make the same effort."

The full text of the Ruling is available on the NEM Website.

This week the Commission approved a settlement that would replace Columbia's current gas cost recovery mechanism with an auction approach to gas procurement. The settlement provides for a two-tiered auction process. First, a wholesale auction process will be used for two consecutive one-year periods commencing on April 1, 2010, that will determine a Standard Service Option for non-migrated customers. Beginning in the year 2012 a retail auction process will be utilized to set a Standard Choice Option (SCO) for non-migrated customers. As a result of the SCO auction, individual customers will be transferred to winning bidders. The settlement would also implement a uniform fee for firm balancing service to be applied to both standard service and migrated customers. The full text of the Order is available on the NEM Website.