ISO Opposes Retail Supplier's Petition At FERC For Billing Adjustment

March 23, 2020

Email This Story
Copyright 2010-20 EnergyChoiceMatters.com
Reporting by Paul Ring • ring@energychoicematters.com

The following story is brought free of charge to readers by EC Infosystems, the exclusive EDI provider of EnergyChoiceMatters.com

ISO New England filed an answer at FERC opposing a petition filed by Liberty Power Holdings LLC in which Liberty is seeking a billing adjustment related to a utility billing error, as the ISO said that, "Liberty had numerous occasions to detect the error and request that it be corrected pursuant to procedures in the ISO’s Transmission, Markets and Services Tariff ('Tariff') intended for exactly that purpose," and that, in the words of the ISO, "Liberty failed to take timely or appropriate action to do so."

See background on the billing error, related to incorrect assignment of a load obligation, and Liberty's petition here

Liberty is seeking an order directing the ISO to refund $191,400, plus interest, to Liberty

ISO-NE alleged in its answer that, "Liberty’s Complaint rests on the assertion that 'Liberty could not have reasonably known of the existence of the alleged error until Eversource brought its error to Liberty’s attention through an email received from Eversource on June 3, 2019.' But in fact, in the three months leading up to the applicable deadline, Liberty was given information on five separate occasions that should have alerted it -- and indeed, that would have alerted any reasonable party -- to the November 2018 error ... the very reason this information is provided is to alert Participants to the sorts of error that Liberty failed to notice in sufficient time to allow such an error to be rectified by the ISO."

The ISO said that the deadline to submit a Meter Data Error Request for Billing Adjustment (RBA) for November 2018, the month at issue, was May 16, 2019. The request submitted by Liberty on July 11, 2019 was therefore out of time, and the ISO was required to reject it, the ISO said

The ISO detailed four occasions in the billing and reconciliation process on which the ISO provided information to Liberty

The ISO further noted that, "Following the conclusion of the data-reconciliation process and the ISO’s April 16, 2019 issuance of the resettlement bill in which Liberty was invoiced for $191,440 more than it believes was due, Liberty had a thirty additional days -- until the Meter Data Error RBA submission deadline on May 16, 2019 -- to provide the ISO or Eversource with notice of a Meter Data Error discrepancy. It did not do so."

"Furthermore, the tolling provision that Liberty claims gives safe harbor where a party only discovers an error after the deadline has passed is taken from a set of billing procedures that explicitly do not apply in this case," the ISO said

"Not only is Liberty’s July 11, 2019 Requested Billing Adjustment out of time, it was submitted pursuant to Section 6 of the Billing Policy, which unequivocally cannot be used to correct Meter Data Errors," the ISO said

A provision of the Billing Policy, "states explicitly that 'a request for a correction of a Meter Data Error shall not be considered a Requested Billing Adjustment for purposes of the ISO New England Billing Policy,' instead requiring that 'requests for corrections of Meter Data Errors will be handled exclusively through the procedures set out in Market Rule 1,'" the ISO said

"As a consequence, Liberty’s repeated reference to the Tariff’s waiver of the three-month window to submit a Requested Billing Adjustment in the case where 'the Disputing Party could not have reasonably known of the existence of the alleged error within such time' does not apply to the November 2018 Meter Data Error. Neither the Requested Billing Adjustment referred to in the tolling provision, nor the tolling provision itself, nor any of the billing dispute procedures found in Section 6 of the Billing Policy, apply to Meter Data Error RBAs. And there is good reason that this is so," the ISO said

"In addition to these critical infirmities, Liberty also ignores the importance of settlement finality that underlies the correction procedures in the Tariff. For all these reasons, the Commission should reject Liberty’s Complaint," the ISO said

ISO-NE said, "In order to resettle the November 2018 Meter Data Error, the ISO would have to resettle all New England markets—energy, capacity, and ancillary services -- for every Market Participant for every interval of the month of November 2018. While the majority of money changing hands as a result of the resettlement would be between Liberty and the Load Asset owner who benefited from the metering error (whose identity is unknown to the ISO), correcting the Meter Data Error would result in the ISO’s issuance of 30 days’ worth of settlement reports -- and a new invoice -- to every Market Participant in New England. The new invoices would differ from the final invoices Participants received and paid well over a year prior because the allocation of costs across multiple market services would be impacted under the resettlement."

ADVERTISEMENT
NEW Jobs on RetailEnergyJobs.com:
• NEW! -- Energy Procurement Manager
• NEW! -- Channel Relations Manager -- Retail Supplier
• NEW! -- Senior Retail Energy Markets Pricing Analyst
• NEW! -- Energy Market Analyst -- DFW
• Senior Consultant - Competitive Energy Markets -- Houston