Free Republic

Federal regulators handed a major victory Friday to Western utilities and cities trying to escape exorbitant contracts they made with disgraced energy giant Enron Corp. during the power crunch of 2000-01. In a six-page order issued Friday evening, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission determined that Enron was engaging in illegal activity at the time it entered the contracts with the utilities - and that therefore, a hearing should be held to determine whether Enron should be allowed to collect profits it would have received had those contracts been fulfilled. It was the first time FERC acknowledged that the contracts were...

A federal court in California has dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Port of Seattle against a dozen Northwest utilities and power marketing companies, including Puget Sound Energy. That suit charged that the companies conspired to manipulate the West Coast power market and drive up the cost of electricity during the region's supply crunch and price spike in 2000 and 2001. But a judge in U.S. District Court for the southern district of California dismissed the complaint this week, ruling that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has jurisdiction over such issues. That disclosure came from a Securities and Exchange Commission...

IntercontinentalExchange Inc. has filed a suit in the United Stated District Court for the Southern District of New York against the New York Mercantile Exchange, Inc., (NYMEX) seeking to prevent NYMEX from abusing its monopoly power in the market for trading and clearing North American energy futures contracts and extending its monopoly into the market for over-the-counter (OTC) energy trading. Intercontinental's claim, which was made as part of a counterclaim in an action initiated by NYMEX, asserts that NYMEX's efforts to prevent Intercontinental from using NYMEX settlement prices by claiming that these prices are copyrightable works of 'authorship' represents an...

<p>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.</p> <p>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.</p>