California:FERC Asks Power Sellers to Report 'Round-Trip' Trades

Bloomberg News ^ | 05/21 12:02 | Liz Skinner

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Washington, May 21 (Bloomberg) -- Dynegy Inc., Duke Energy Corp. and other companies that sold power in the western U.S. in 2000 and 2001 must report their ``round-trip'' energy trades by May 31, U.S. energy regulators ordered.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said previous transaction data was reported inconsistently and can't be used to identify such trades, which are defined as the simultaneous purchase and sale of the same amount of a commodity with the same trading partner.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Calpowercrisis:

To find all articles tagged or indexed using Calpowercrisis, click below:
	click here >>>	Calpowercrisis	<<< click here
(To view all FR Bump Lists, click here)

[Robert357]

The companies were ordered to say whether they ``engaged in activities referred to as `wash,' `round trip' or `sell/buyback' trading.'' Companies that report such activities must list the price the power was sold for and whether the sales were reported to any organization that publishes prices.

This will be interesting to watch as this will be the basis of new refund claims and these companies (or their stockholders) will need to quickly establish reserve accounts to pay those claims. California will be finacially desperate and FERC will likely move quickly on this during this political season, if there are many trades just to shut the dem's up. I have changed my mind and now think that FERC will try to do something more than it has previously signaled, but I still expect it will not be that significant (i.e. less than a one or two billion). Of course, I have been wrong before.