It is too early for Entergy Arkansas to determine how a recent decision by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission will affect Entergy's 700,000 Arkansas customers, the utility said this week.
"We're still doing all the evaluations," Entergy Arkansas spokesman Kerri Case said Monday. "At this point it's just too soon to say how this is going to affect customers' bills."
Last month, Entergy Arkansas paid its four other Entergy Corp. subsidiary companies more than $135 million to comply with the federal commission's order in October.
The conflict began in 2009 when the Louisiana Public Service Commission filed a complaint with the federal commission challenging Entergy Arkansas' right to make certain electricity sales in the wholesale market during a 10-year period from 2000 to 2009, Case said.
Entergy argued that these sales were consistent with the system agreement, a working arrangement among Entergy Corp.'s subsidiary utilities, Case said.
In 2012, the federal commission concluded that the system agreement permitted Entergy Arkansas to make certain electricity sales for its own account, and that the sales were made and priced in good faith, Case said.
However, the federal commission also concluded that Entergy misinterpreted a provision of the system agreement, Case sad.
As a result, the methodology originally used to allocate energy costs for the sales was incorrect, the federal commission determined. So it directed further proceedings to put the five subsidiary Entergy companies back in the same place they would have been had the energy costs been originally allocated as the federal commission believed they should have been, Case said.
Since 2012, the federal commission has held two hearings on the appropriate methodology to determine the cost of the energy used to supply the sales and to quantify the amount of payments owed by Entergy Arkansas to the other Entergy companies.
The federal commission issued an order in October to address the last of those hearings. On Dec. 17, Entergy made a compliance filing in response to the October order, Case said.
The compliance filing provided a final calculation of Entergy Arkansas' payments to the other utility operating companies, including interest.
The payments, made by Entergy Arkansas on Dec. 14, were $58.6 million paid to Entergy Louisiana; $36.2 million paid to Entergy Mississippi; $33.2 million made to Entergy Texas; and $7 million to Entergy New Orleans.
The payments total slightly more than $135 million.
Entergy Arkansas has not made a filing yet with the Arkansas Public Service Commission seeking consent to recover payments from its customers, said Donna Gray, spokesman for the state commission.
The state commission is evaluating the amount of the payments Entergy Arkansas made, Gray said.
"We are aware of the magnitude of the [federal] decision," Gray said. "We are evaluating what that could mean for [Entergy Arkansas] ratepayers."
Business on 01/23/2019