NEM held its Winter Executive Committee and Policy Development Meeting last week at the South Carolina Research Authority in Charleston, South Carolina for a third time. The meeting was a great success. We had the benefit of insights from Raymond Vickery, senior advisor to Hillary Clinton, and James Woolsey, senior advisor to John McCain, on the candidates' presidential policy agendas. Many thanks to SCRA for hosting the meeting.

NEM booked the new Embassy Suites Hotel Washington D.C. Convention Center for the Annual Spring Membership Meeting and Restructuring Conference on April 29 and 30, 2008. Please register at this hotlink. Hotel accommodations have also been arranged at this facility located at 900 10th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20001. NEM has secured preferred hotel rates of $259.00 per night. Please call (202) 739-2001 to make your reservations. A final agenda will be released shortly.

Thus far, we have confirmed the following featured speakers for the event: US House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC), FERC Commissioner Jon Wellinghoff, CFTC Commissioner Michael Dunn, New York PSC Chairman Garry Brown and Massachusetts DPU Chairman Paul Hibbard.

Please call headquarters for sponsorship opportunities for the Spring Event as advertisements are currently being developed. Your attendance, participation and sponsorship of these events are needed and would be greatly appreciated.

NEM joined a group of 82 diverse entities in an Industry Response to certain customer groups, including ELCON and APPA, that had petitioned FERC to expand its ongoing inquiry into wholesale competition in organized electric markets. The customer petitioners had urged FERC to, "investigate the justness and reasonableness of wholesale power prices charged in RTO-run centralized markets." The Industry Response urged FERC to stay the course with the scope of its current proceeding, noting the deficiency of the customer group filing in providing any new evidence to justify a fundamental redesign of the markets. The Industry Response noted that, "The organized markets are regional in scope, independently administered, and rely on a single clearing price based on locational marginal pricing to meet demand for energy. Independent observers agree that this is an efficient means to operate organized competitive electricity markets, and the Commission has so found in its orders." The full text of the Industry Response is available on the NEM Website.

The Maryland Public Service Commission filed a complaint against PJM with FERC. The Maryland PSC complaint questions, "whether blanket exemptions from energy offer caps are just and reasonable and whether PJM violated its tariff by failing to post the results of the MMU's quarterly evaluation of the need for offer cap exemptions, thus denying stakeholders and the Commission information on which to base a Section 206 complaint and depriving the Commission of an opportunity to consider the merits of the MMU's concerns. As a consequence, customers have paid and continue to pay unjust and unreasonable energy prices that reflect the exercise of market power. The MD PSC seeks both the elimination of these anticompetitive and unlawful exemptions going forward and refunds from at least September 2006, the date of PJM's tariff violations." PJM uses a three pivotal supplier test to determine market competitiveness, imposing offer caps on those generation resources that fail to meet the test. However, there are two exemptions from the offer capping process for generation resources' offers to relieve reactive limits on four transmission interfaces and for generation resources for which construction was commenced within certain time periods. The Maryland PSC has requested fast track processing of its complaint. The full text of the Complaint is available from NEM headquarters.