FERC Announces Technical Conferences Focused on Clean Power Plan

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has announced plans to hold a series of technical conferences around the country to discuss the impact of the proposed Clean Power Plan on electric utilities.  The first of these conferences will be a National Overview technical conference to be held at the FERC on February 19, 2015.  Subsequent regional conferences will be held in Washington, DC, St. Louis, MO, and Denver, CO.  Among the topics to be discussed in the National Overview conference are (i) whether state utility and environmental regulators, regulated entities and others have the appropriate tools to identify reliability and/or market issues that may arise, (ii) potential strategies for complying with the EPA regulations and coordinating with FERC-jurisdictional wholesale and interstates markets, and (iii) how planning entities, industry and states coordinate reliability and infrastructure planning processes with environmental compliance efforts to ensure the adequate development of new infrastructure and to manage any potential reliability and operational impacts of proposed compliance plans.