Law360, New York (July 13, 2012, 1:04 PM ET) -- On June 21, 2012, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission denied requests for rehearing of its March 17, 2011, order affirming an $80,000 penalty assessed against the Turlock Irrigation District by the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) for the violation of several reliability standards resulting from a power outage. North American Electric Reliability Corp., 139 FERC ¶ 61,248 (2012).
The vegetation-caused transmission outage occurred in August 2007 and caused 40,000 customers of the Turlock and Modesto Irrigation Districts to lose power. A number of parties, including the...