RTO Insider reported on FERC commission activity, highlighting various perspectives as the new year of 2019 approaches. AEE’s view is included, quoting Dylan Reed, Head of Congressional Affairs as he noted the significant market opportunity in implementing Order 841 (energy storage) and the expected rule for distributed energy resources. See excerpts below and read the entire RTO Insider story here.

A year ago, the electricity policy-sphere was on pins and needles over how FERC and its new Chairman Kevin McIntyre would respond to the Trump administration’s bid to bail out coal and nuclear generators.

McIntyre won plaudits in January when he led a 5-0 vote rejecting the Department of Energy’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and instituting a new resilience docket (AD18-7). FERC begins 2019 with a new chairman and renewed questions about whether it will resist the president’s efforts to deliver on his campaign pledges to coal country…

Republican Bernard McNamee — who helped author the DOE NOPR and who has complained that renewables are disruptive to “the physics of the grid” — was sworn in as commissioner after winning Senate confirmation on a 50-49 party-line vote. At his first open meeting, days before Christmas, McNamee was greeted by protests and questions over whether he would recuse himself from the resilience debate…

In February, the commission also approved Order 841, which required regional grid operators to remove barriers to electric storage in their capacity, energy and ancillary services markets. Dylan Reed, head of congressional affairs for Advanced Energy Economy, said the compliance filings by grid operators in December “could lead to a minimum of 7 GW of storage deployment in the RTO markets and potentially could lead to 50 GW across the country. For scale, the rule’s impact is essentially the equivalent of 86% of all installed solar capacity to date,” Reed said during AEE’s year-end webinar. “So, this really is a monumental rule…”

With the arrival of McNamee, “it’s unclear where [the DER ruling] is going to go in 2019,” said AEE’s Reed. “Fortunately, we do know that Chairman Chatterjee is committed to innovation and removing barriers to technologies as he’s now said in numerous public speeches over the last few months.”

See excerpts below and read the entire RTO Insider story here.