On February 26, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for the first time initiated a review of a Notice of Penalty filed By the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) regarding the settlement of an alleged violation of mandatory Reliability Standards. According to FERC, the $80,000 proposed penalty amount in the Notice of Penalty may be insufficient under the circumstances surrounding the violations at issue, because the vegetation-related outage led to a combined loss of 270 MW of firm load in the systems of two Registered Entities: Turlock Irrigation District (Turlock), the subject of the Notice of Penalty, and Modesto Irrigation District. In order to determine whether the penalty is appropriate, and to determine if there are any other violations that may have contributed to the loss of firm load, FERC stayed the effectiveness of the settlement and established a deadline of March 18, 2010 for answers, interventions, and comments on these issues. Read more…