CHATTERJEE, Commissioner, concurring:
- I fully support the Commission’s determination to accept Southwestern Public Service Company’s (SPS) filing and grant SPS’s request for waiver of the prior notice requirement to allow this rate decrease to go into effect on January 1, 2020.
- I write separately to emphasize my support for the Commission’s long-standing policy to “generally grant waiver of the 60-day notice requirement . . . [for] filings that reduce rates and charges . . . .”1 The Commission has routinely granted waiver to allow rate decreases to go into effect prior to the filing date.2 I see no reason to deviate from this policy here.
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The filed rate doctrine and the rule against retroactive ratemaking "operate as a nearly impenetrable shield for consumers"3 and do not, as the dissent suggests, require the Commission to reject SPS’s requested effective date to the detriment of SPS’s customers.4 I support granting this waiver because it protects SPS’s customers from excessive rates, it is consistent with the Commission’s long-standing policy, and there is no court precedent that prohibits us from doing so.
For these reasons, I respectfully concur,
Neil Chatterjee, Commissioner
- 1Old Dominion Elec. Coop., Inc. v. FERC, 892 F.3d 1223, 1230 (D.C. Cir. 2018) (citations omitted).
- 2See Danly Dissent at P 1. The dissent cites to a prior dissent that did not involve the issue presented here, i.e., a retroactive rate decrease.
- 3Cent. Hudson Gas & Elec. Corp., 60 FERC ¶ 61,106, at 61,338, reh’g denied, 61 FERC ¶ 61,089 (1992).
- 4See, e.g., PJM Interconnection, L.L.C., 167 FERC ¶ 61,083, at P 37 (2019); FirstEnergy Solutions Corp., 167 FERC ¶ 61,019, at P 9 (2019) (both accepting rate reduction filings with effective dates before date of filing).