What Did They Know, And When Did They Know It?
That is the question that was asked by Senate investigators about Richard Nixon’s criminal activity in the Watergate case. Now we face a similar situation with the PJM/AEP/Allegheny case.
In December 2009, the Hearing Examiner for the East Virginia State Corporation Commission ordered PJM Interconnection to revise the computer simulations that AEP/Allegheny were using to support their argument for PATH in the SCC case. Specifically, Hearing Examiner Skirpan ordered PJM to include data on demand side management and efficiency impacts generated by PJM’s own energy markets. Mr. Skirpan also ordered PJM to include the results of its 2009 load estimates.
PJM could have made all of this information available to AEP/Allegheny in late summer or early fall. Instead, neither PJM nor AEP/Allegheny made any attempt to update the then-pending certificate of need applications in WV, VA and MD.
The MD PSC rejected AEP/Allegheny’s application outright in late summer because the power companies had filed an illegal application there. The cases in WV and VA proceeded, with volunteer intervenors spending thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of unpaid time to stop the PATH project, which they knew could not be supported by the hard data that PJM was ignoring.
Yesterday, intervenors in East Virginia demanded not only that AEP/Allegheny should be barred from ever re-applying for PATH in VA again, but that intervenors should be reimbursed by AEP/Allegheny for all their costs in the VA SCC PATH case.
They are fully justified in doing so. The VA SCC case proceeded on a much faster track than the WV or MD cases. East Virginia intervenors have a huge money and time investment in the case. They will never be repaid for the volunteer time they put into protecting every East Virginia citizen and every rate payer in PJM.
Should the WV PSC case be dismissed as well, all WV intervenors should likewise be reimbursed for all costs to date by AEP/Allegheny.
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