Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
NEE has filed a lawsuit against NEI. In the lawsuit, NEE said, “NEI recently has been vigorously advocating for irrational and unreasonable policies that would distort electric energy markets.” “In this, NEI has also funded studies that call into question the reliability and costs of the electric system, attempting to create a false sense of panic and unfairly and incorrectly maligning the operations of its members, including the NextEra Companies.”
One of the main reasons for the lawsuit is the claim by NEE that the NEI prevented their access to the PADS because they cancelled their membership in the NEI. NEE has six scheduled outages in 2018. It is very important to them to have access to the PADS in order to hire the extra staff that the outages will require. FLP has been a member of the NEI for over twenty years and has consistently paid its dues which helped maintain the PADS system. The terms of membership with respect to access to the PADS state that a NEI member’s access can only be terminated after a minimum of three months advanced notice.
NEE alleges that they were told on January 30th by NEI that they could only access the PADS through March of 2018 if they paid NEI $860,000 dollars. NEE says that most of that money is related to membership charges of the NEI that have nothing to do with access to the PADS. The complaint states that NEI was fully aware of the damage and expense that denying access to the PADS would cause NEE and that they were using that for leverage to force NEE to pay unnecessary membership dues.
A spokesperson for NEE said, “We think this was the very definition of extortion.” “We made a business decision to leave NEI; we thought they had not adapted to changing times. They are simply attempting to retaliate against us by trying to squeeze cash out of us and our customers.”
The NEI president said that her organization, “vehemently denies all of the allegations in NextEra’s lawsuit and will vigorously defend our position in court.” She said, in an email, that when NEE canceled its membership, it lost the right to access the PADS. However, the NEI did say that it would give NEE PADS information so that NEE could fully comply with the relevant Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulations.
The NEI President attacked what she called NEE’s “inflammatory statements,” saying “To call NEI’s approach retaliatory, or even suggest the notion of extortion, is both counter-factual and offensive to the good faith effort the offer represents.” She said that NEI had recently contacted NEE to work on opening a conversation with NEE that would “advance the industry’s interest in remaining unified, or as unified as possible, on regulatory and other policy positions.” She said that NEE reacted by launching a “baseless lawsuit.”
The NEI claims that in considering its support for Perry’s policy proposals, it did extensive polling of its members to decide what its position should be with respect to the policy proposal. They say that regardless of the attitude of NEE towards the Perry proposal, their support of the proposal represented the interests of the majority of their membership.
It will be interesting to see what the result of the NEE lawsuit is.
