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Federal regulators on Oct. 17 denied a complaint by Public Citizen asserting that the PJM Interconnection may have improperly recovered from customers millions of dollars in lobbying fees and campaign contributions.
According to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the situation closely mirrors one at the center of a proceeding in which the agency in 2006 found that the ISO New England could recover certain lobbying costs so long as they were not used to finance partisan political activity.
In this case, FERC said, "Public Citizen has failed to put forward evidence showing that [PJM's] expenditures do not represent an educational or informational function of the [regional transmission organization] essential to its core operations or do not support policies that the RTO determines to be in the collective best interests of its stakeholders."
While all three sitting FERC members signed onto the decision, Commissioner Richard Glick during the agency's Oct. 17 open monthly meeting pressed PJM and other grid...