On January 31, 2017 the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued an order accepting PJM’s compliance filing that noted an underfunding in the PJM Financial Transmission Rights (FTR). The funding mechanism will be addressed by allocating balancing congestion charges to real-time load. As a result of FERC’s acceptance of the filing, all Load Serving Entities (LSE) will incur a new balancing congestion charge according to their customers’ load from PJM. For more details on this filing please link to: https://www.ferc.gov/CalendarFiles/20170131173534-EL16-6-002.pdf.

In addition, due to the FERC’s ruling on the PJM’s compliance filing, LSEs are citing the ruling as a Change in Law that allows them to pass through the new balancing congestion charges to their customers.
A Change in Law means the occurrence after the date of an agreement of any of the following: the adoption or taking effect of any law, rule, regulation or treaty in the administration, interpretation, implementation or application thereof by any Governmental Authority. Please refer to your supplier’s contract regarding specific details surrounding Change In Law stipulations.

The new congestion charge is expected to result in an additional charge of $.0002-.0005/KWh on a customer’s bill. In all likelihood, this will be a separate line item charge on their bills (it is not clear yet how each supplier will handle this charge). Each customer’s actual charge will vary somewhat depending on the location and size of the customer in question. The new balancing congestion charges are expected to begin in June, 2017. In addition, these new balancing congestion charge estimates are from one supplier, Constellation. At this time, we do not know how other suppliers will handle these charges or what their expected costs will be.