Lynne Kiesling
Tom Lenard has a post on the PFF blog in response to my post the other day about S.498. Tom says
One reason I like the Burr bill (and liked its predecessors that he introduced as a member of the House) is that it contains perhaps the only truly deregulatory measure – in the sense of actually reducing a regulatory agency’s authority – of any of the electricity bills under consideration of late: Repealing section 203 of the Federal Power Act, which requires FERC approval of property transfers, effectively takes FERC out of the merger review process and puts merger reviews where they belong – at the Department of Justice. This would be a very significant change.
Obviously I agree with that! I also agree that anything that moves us toward performance-based transmission rates is an improvement, although I think that this step is not exactly dramatic or dynamic.
While Tom and I do tend to agree on most things, the remainder of this bill tends to cover issues on which we do disagree, and on which we have different interpretations. The market-based tent is a big one. So I encourage you to check out his reactions and formulate your own.