Calpine Fined for Violating Reliability Standards, California Power Market Outage Rules

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Nov. 1 approved an agreement resolving claims that Calpine Corp. violated the North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s reliability standards concerning maintenance and testing of protection systems, which contains certain battery testing requirements, as well as California power market rules relating to forced outages.

Texas-based Calpine agreed to the terms of the settlement with FERC’s Office of Enforcement, Texas Reliability Entity Inc., and NERC. The company must pay a civil penalty of $375,000 to Texas RE and $25,000 to the U.S. Treasury. Calpine also agreed to undertake obligations including a mitigation plan to comply with the NERC reliability standard, and submission of annual compliance monitoring reports for two years, with an optional third year at the discretion of the Enforcement Office.

The Enforcement Office, NERC, and Texas RE determined that Calpine either failed to perform a battery test, failed to retain testing records, or created falsified testing records in 215 instances from Dec. 29, 2012 to Dec. 26, 2015. Of these, 206 were self-reported, and the remaining nine were identified during the investigation. Further, 79 instances were falsified and the remaining 136 instances did not have testing records. 

The office also determined that Calpine violated the California Independent System Operator Corporation’s tariffs on Oct. 28, 2013 and Feb. 2, 2015 at the Gilroy Energy Center,  a 141-megawatt gas-fired peaking facility, when it called on the unit to run, and only then declared it unavailable. Failing to report a unit’s unavailability can present problems as proper outage reporting enables the grid operator to maintain system reliability and maximize schedule feasibility relative to congestion and demand, while allowing market participants to plan effectively to operate their resources.

Calpine’s operations are located in 23 states, with a significant presence in Texas, California, and the Mid-Atlantic.