Natural Resources Defense Council v. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission

On June 19, 2020, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) filed two petitions for review in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals seeking review of FERC orders that NRDC <a href="https://www.nrdc.org/experts/christopher-casey/nrdc-sues-ferc-over-orders-threaten-ny-clean-energy">describes</a> as “examples of federal policies blocking the clean energy transition” in New York State by requiring application of “buyer-side mitigation” rules to two types of technologies: (1) electric storage resources (e.g., batteries) and (2) demand response resources (which “pay customers to reduce their energy usage at the direction of the grid operator to help alleviate different types of stress on the electric grid”) The buyer-side mitigation rules for the New York Independent System Operator’s capacity market require that the bids for these types of resources not take into account the subsidies they receive from State programs, thereby increasing their bid prices. According to NRDC, “[t]he effect of FERC’s orders is to artificially raise the bid price of storage and demand response resources so that they are ‘out of the money’ and therefore are not selected in the capacity market auction. As a result, they will not displace, dirty incumbent fossil fuel power plants.”