Don't do it, Mid-Atlantic states. Don't accept the electric grid's offer to settle your complaint. Don't let the dirty secrets that have begun to emerge get covered up.
Expose possible abuses found by an internal watchdog at PJM Interconnection, the regional grid manager. Identify the generation company he said reaped $20 million in "excess payments" over two weeks. Find out who might be getting away with similar shenanigans.
Here in Central Maryland we just got a 72 percent electric-price pop. We want as clear a view of our deregulated electricity market as Californians got of theirs after the Enron debacle, and this case looks like it'll help.
PJM is the nonprofit Pennsylvania company that supervises the grid and runs the wholesale electricity market from New Jersey to North Carolina.
Maryland and other states have sought redress with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission over claims by PJM market monitor Joseph Bowring that his bosses silenced him when he wanted to report price irregularities and outsized profits at generation companies. They want Bowring's operation made independent.
PJM's apparently panicked offer to settle, disclosed Thursday, suggests that some very interesting evidence will surface if the case is pursued.
Only a month ago PJM rejected Bowring's allegations, accusing him in a federal filing of distorting facts and "dramatic language, rhetoric and innuendo." The regulatory complaint, the grid manager said, "promptly should be dismissed." PJM chief executive Phillip Harris told employees at a company luau that "we never asked for a market monitor" but had to have one under federal rules, according to a recording of the event.
Now Harris is gone, shocking the industry by "retiring" two weeks ago. Last week PJM caved in and offered to settle, suggesting that Bowring report to PJM's board rather than to PJM executives.
PJM didn't even wait for the completion of its own investigation of Bowring's allegations.
What happened? I can only assume that generation and transmission companies, who wield great influence with PJM's board, didn't want to see the case advance and said so. ("I can't speak to any discussions between the board and certain members," said PJM spokesman Terry Williamson.)
Litigating the matter would produce documents illuminating the grid's dark corners and Bowring's allegations that generators sometimes have the ability to exert "market power" - a euphemism for monopoly profits reaped during periods of high demand.
