Clean energy groups urge FERC to reject Southeast Energy Exchange Market

The SEEM produced $3.7 million in benefits in 2023 but had $4.3 million in administrative costs, according to Advanced Energy United and other groups. Clean energy trade groups, the Sierra Club and others last week urged the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to reverse its decision approving the Southeast Energy Exchange Market.

“SEEM is not a properly functioning market, but rather is a discriminatory, closed-access pooling arrangement,” Advanced Energy United, the Clean Energy Buyers Association and the Solar Energy Industries Association said in a joint reply brief filed with FERC on Thursday.

Last year, SEEM, a real-time market launched in late 2022, produced $3.7 million in reported benefits and had $4.3 million in administrative costs, cleared 704,000/MWh, or 0.1% of the region’s annual demand, and no non-utilities appear to have participated in it, according to the groups. “If that is sufficient to pass muster as a competitive, open-access market in the Commission’s current view, then Order No. 888 is currently on life support,” they said.

The SEEM proposal remains just, reasonable and not unduly discriminatory or preferential, according to SEEM participants.

“SEEM serves an important purpose, facilitating intra-hour transactions that use otherwise unused transmission across [a 10-state] region to achieve lower rates for customers,” they said in an Aug. 13 brief at FERC. “Rules for participation in SEEM are open and non-discriminatory, limited only by issues of technical feasibility. All similarly situated customers are treated the same, including the SEEM members, who take service on the same terms and conditions, and at the same rates, as anyone else.”

However, SEEM opponents contend that the market is an exclusionary power pool.

“No matter what euphemisms and excuses the utilities advance to recharacterize SEEM and its technical limitations, it remains an unlawful power pool,” the opponents, including Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a joint reply brief. “In plain contravention of Order No. 888, SEEM provides the region’s monopoly utilities highly favorable transmission terms while denying them to non-participants, further concentrating the utilities’ market power and harming their ratepaying customers.”