Over the past ten months or so, from December 31, 2009, through the New York Stock Exchange market close on Friday November 12, you could have earned about 8.5% counting dividends – versus about 9.25% on the same terms for the S&P 500 – simply by buying and holding this basic eight-company portfolio, dominated by financials and consumer products retailers: Bank of America, Citigroup, HSBC, Kimberly Clark, Proctor & Gamble, Safeway, Target, and UBS.

Not so, however, for anyone employed by the PJM Interconnection, the independent operator of the regional electricity grid for the greater mid-Atlantic, covering the historic core (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Washington, D.C., Virginia, and West Virginia), and now extending into parts of Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and North Carolina. If you work at PJM, or even if your wife or husband does, well, you can kiss that 8.5% return goodbye – and the 9.25% on the S&P as well. Read more »

Posted: November 15th, 2010 under Electric Utility Regulation, Energy Markets, FERC, PJM, RTOs.
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Joseph Bowring, President of Monitoring Analytics, LLC, the Independent Market Monitor (IMM) for the PJM Interconnection, the regional transmission organization for the Mid-Atlantic states, has sent the RTO running back to Valley Forge with its tail between its legs, after having forced PJM to concede defeat in a dispute over the release and Internet posting of confidential bid and offer pricing data in the form of Excel spreadsheets relating to a recent Base Residual Auction (BRA) for the PJM capacity market, known as the Reliability Pricing Model (RPM), as was conducted in May 2009, for the 2012-2013 delivery year.

The issue was whether PJM had done enough to “aggregate” and “mask” the released data, so that clever market participants could not thumb through the spreadsheets with a discerning eye and figure out the exact price points contained in buy and sell bids submitted by rival utilities or generation capacity suppliers. Read more »

Posted: April 9th, 2010 under Bids and Offers, Capacity Markets, Confidential Information, Electric Utility Regulation, ISOs, Independent Market Monitor, Market Monitoring, PJM, RPM, RTOs, Reliability Pricing Model.
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