Two days ago, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan said she had evidence a company called Edison Mission Energy continued a suspicious pattern of wholesale electricity trading long after it claimed to have stopped.
Why does this matter to Maryland?
Edison Mission sells electricity to the PJM grid, which stretches from the East Coast to Illinois. Potential price manipulation by Edison Mission or any other electricity producer in a deregulated marketplace can reap hundreds of millions in improper profits and raise prices for everybody who gets their power off the grid.
That includes you, Baltimore Gas and Electric customers.
Edison Mission denied Madigan's allegation yesterday, saying the troubling behavior she identified came from generation plants owned by other companies.
"These are not our units," said company spokesman Doug McFarlan.
Edison's or not, somebody appears to be gaming the system. The case joins the pile of evidence suggesting that the wholesale market - where we all get our juice, thanks to deregulation - is often still rigged in favor of generation companies years after Enron got caught at it.
Worse, that evidence has been all but ignored by the federal regulators who are supposed to be policing things.
"We do have an interest in making sure the prices that are being produced through this PJM process are not products of manipulation," says Maryland People's Counsel Paula Carmody, who joined numerous parties in pleading with the feds this week to get to the bottom of the Edison Mission case. "This company needs to be reined in" if it hasn't stopped the troubling behavior, she said.
The Edison Mission case surfaced last month when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission revealed it had been investigating the company's suspect trading for years and that Edison officials had "misled" investigators with "protracted" evasions that amounted to "severe" conduct.
FERC fined Edison Mission, which owns big generation plants in Illinois and Pennsylvania, $9 million. But it closed the case without making any judgments about what Edison was hiding and was satisfied with Edison's promise that it stopped the troubling trading in 2006.
Attorney General Madigan says Edison seems to have continued the pattern at least into last year.
