The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission turned aside a strong challenge from a crowd of state officials, municipal and cooperative utilities and industrial power buyers to the forward power capacity auctions that the PJM Interconnection has conducted. But FERC did agree to the coalition's request for a technical conference to consider possible improvements in the capacity market. That could prove to be a discussion forum for issues raised by consulting company Brattle Group in a report on the capacity market. The coalition, calling itself RPM Buyers, filed a complaint on May 30 about the power prices resulting from PJM's so-called reliability pricing model auctions during the transition between PJM's previous capacity mechanism and full implementation of RPM. RPM Buyers alleged that the auctions during the transition resulted in unjust and unreasonable capacity prices, and FERC should therefore order refunds [Docket No. EL08-67]. RPM Buyers asked FERC to cut by possibly 54% the capacity payments established through the auctions.
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