What's Happening in Energy highlights the most interesting findings from public utility commission filings.
What's Happening in Energy — Feb 6
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In Arkansas, Oklahoma Gas & Electric (OG&E) applied to the Public Service Commission for approval to construct and acquire the 302 MW Frontier Energy Storage Project, a battery energy storage system (BESS) identified through the utility’s 2024 All-Resource RFP. OG&E seeks cost recovery through the Generating Arkansas Jobs Rider.
Halcyon angle: While Halcyon’s docket profile executive summary provides a high-level overview, Halcyon’s query can narrow in on the info you want – in this response, a project cost of $393.8 million.
Want more details like these on battery projects across the US? Click here to learn about Halcyon’s BESS Tracker.
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In ISO-NE, wind and solar short-term generation forecasts have very different error bands (or uncertainty ranges).
For wind, the rolling 30-day mean absolute error (MAE–the difference between the forecasted to true value expressed as a percentage of the true value) short-term forecast is near the industry standard of roughly 10%. MAE remains quite stable from 0 to four hours ahead of time.
For solar, forecast performance is more volatile. As power output increases in the middle of the day, the MAE averaged across the entire fleet increases. For one facility, MAE exceeds 50% in the middle of the day.
Check out the two presentations from ISO-NE, which also include performance for medium- to long-term horizons.
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In North Dakota, a 255 MW project spanning seven townships called Homestead Wind, filed its “Ten Year Plan” with the Public Service Commission (PSC) after Williams County approved a Conditional Use Permit. Given the very short interconnection line (<1 mile between the project substation and the existing Mountrail‑Williams Electric Cooperative Strandahl substation) it will NOT be considered a “transmission facility” under the Commission’s jurisdiction. Check out the map of the project location. For the full resolution map, check out the blog or the filing linked below.
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In Nevada, parties are settling a billing classification issue going back 25 years! NV Energy (Nevada Power and Sierra Pacific Power) is to refund residential customers that had been incorrectly billed due to misclassification (single family vs. multifamily). Estimates of the overbilling started at $17 million, but have now reached $63.1 million in the “Offer of Compromise” floated by the utility in January to refund customers. NV Energy offered an apology:
“The Companies recognize the severity of this error and sincerely regret the effect it has had on affected customers.”
Regulatory Operations Staff proposed to accept the utility’s compromise, with conditions such as confirming that all refunds have been issued, a report on the measures NV Energy took to identify all misclassifications, and other compliance measures.
“Staff believes that this would be a reasonable resolution of this matter because it would, among other things, provide guaranteed reimbursements to overcharged Nevada customers in the immediate future while avoiding the delays and risks that are inherent to protracted litigation.”
Mission:data, a nonprofit organization that advocates for meter transparency, offered what it considered a more sustainable solution to billing issues (i.e. Green Button, a standard enabling utility customers to securely download or share their energy usage data).
“Enabling an independent class of energy experts, funded not by the Nevada Legislature but with private funds via non-profits or energy management firms, allows the Commission to reach similar results –i.e. ensuring oversight and surfacing bill errors quickly as they arise – but with considerably less effort…To achieve this, Green Button Connect is the tool for the job.”
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In California, PacifiCorp filed a presentation from March 2025 on the results of its customer survey on public awareness in “awareness of messaging related to wildfire preparedness and safety”. Although the presentation is almost a year old, it has some interesting information, including how aware and satisfied customers are with the resources offered by PacifiCorp. Interestingly, in March 2025, only 13% of respondents in a sample size of 664 were aware of the free portable battery program. However, of those who took advantage of the utility’s resources, this program had the highest customer satisfaction rating. Check out these results on pages 23-36. Open the full WHiE blog on the Halcyon website for the full resolution view of the survey results.
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In MISO, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved revisions to MISO’s Open Access Transmission Tariff (OATT) to modify the first stage of its Reliability Assessment Commitment (RAC), i.e. the Forward Reliability Assessment Commitment (FRAC) process. That’s a mouthful of acronyms if ever there was one, so here’s what it means: FRAC procures resources when the day-ahead market doesn't clear enough capacity to meet reliability needs based on the operator’s load forecasts. It specifically addresses situations where weather forecasts require “deployment of resources that need more lead time to be brought online to meet their market commitment obligations on the operating day.” The revisions, effective January 30th, 2026, help FRAC-committed resources recover their fuel procurement costs, among other things. We asked Halcyon for the bigger picture.
Halcyon angle: ISO/RTO market design changes are not attached to a specific docket like state commission proceedings. To wrap our heads around the history of such changes and how they might impact market participants, we used Halcyon’s search filters to narrow the universe of filings to the relevant terms, and then queried the resulting documents for an explanation of the change. In this example, we filtered to MISO, keywords “Forward Reliability Assessment Criteria”, and date ranges 1/1/2024 to 2/1/2026. Check out the detailed answer.
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In Oregon, Portland General Electric (PGE) applied for approval from the Public Utilities Commission to transfer its transmission assets to a newly formed affiliate, TransCo, and create a holding company, HoldCo. Staff rejected the application. We asked Halcyon why–and got this response breaking down the issues from Staff’s 88 page rebuttal.
The Citizens’ Utility Board (CUB) also weighed in on PGE’s application with 1,203 pages of arguments and exhibits. Our favorite exhibit is the excerpt from the 1978 Oregon Voter’s Guide with arguments for and against a ballot initiative to bar utilities from ratebasing Construction Works in Progress (CWIP).
The Oregon State Council of Senior Advocates were pointed in their support for the measure.
In opposition, the Citizens Concerned for Oregon’s Energy Future argued that this ballot initiative’s true intent was to ban nuclear power.
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In PJM, at a recent workshop, Staff discussed the Expedited Interconnection Track (EIT) for generators associated with large loads. We used Halcyon to understand the EIT tariff sheet released with the meeting materials.
Halcyon angle: Tariff sheets contain a lot of jargon that can make it difficult to quickly understand the main provisions like responsibility for network upgrades and recovery mechanisms. Check out the concise response to a query created by a Halcyon subject matter expert that clearly lays out these requirements.
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In Maryland, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Apartment and Office Building Association of Metropolitan Washington, Office of People’s Council, and the Maryland Energy Office filed a flurry of direct testimony on Pepco’s rate case before the Public Service Commission.
Halcyon angle: Ah, rate case proceedings: long intervals in which nothing is filed, and then, like college students rushing to meet a deadline, a flurry of filings just before submissions close. In this case, no less than 27 documents were submitted on January 30th, many of which were direct testimonies from different intervenors.
Instead of wading through each document one by one, we filtered to the Commission and docket number, 9820, selected the documents submitted since January 30th, and queried the resulting documents for a summary of the different perspectives and the cross-cutting points of contention. See the results here. One interesting nugget from page 26 of Staff witness testimony indicated that Staff revised Pepco’s forecasted plant closure expenditures to roughly $300 million, reducing rate base by $106 million.
Halcyon has developed a Rate Case Tracker that scales the capability of this individual query to extract key data points on rate cases across the US. Check it out–we’re releasing an updated version soon.
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In FERC, Brian Handshy, Principal Consultant at Front Door Technologies (an AI-powered consulting firm for small and medium-sized businesses) filed a comment on the Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANOPR) for large load interconnection. Handshy argued against using regional Effective Load Carrying Capability (ELCC) values to credit Virtual Power Plant (VPP) capacity for offsetting interconnection requests.
The gist of the argument is that regionally dispersed VPPs, while valuable for Resource Adequacy purposes, are not firm or spatiotemporally-specific enough for incorporation into Interconnection Studies, which “serve an entirely different function: determining whether specific transmission and distribution equipment can safely accommodate a new point-to-point power flow without exceeding thermal, voltage, or stability limits under worst-case conditions…Conflating these frameworks would establish dangerous precedent that market-based metrics can override engineering-based safety standards.”
Handshy conducted a Monte Carlo analysis to quantify the attribution of VPP capacity to interconnection studies in the PJM market. Check out the results in the full comment linked below.
Halcyon angle: We came across this filing in Halcyon’s curated alert on PJM resource adequacy challenges. The preset alert sends notifications every Wednesday. If you are interested in customizing the frequency and/or weekday of receipt, create your own Agentic Alert following this guide.
“We are commenting today, because we want the PUC to be aware of the significant risks created by Xcel’s program at ski areas – when full power goes out, Xcel is leaving people hanging in midair in windy, cold conditions, with the entire burden on Eldora or other mountain staffs to evacuate lifts, close lifts or the whole mountain, and ensure safety for thousands of guests with no place to go to get warm. Xcel is reducing its own risk and at the same time, creating a significant one for the public recreating at ski areas.”
New Docket of the Week