FERC-740, Availability of E-Tag Information to Commission Staff

There are no changes to the reporting or recordkeeping requirements. In FERC Order 771 (issued 12/20/2012 in Docket No. RM11-12), the FERC-740 information collection (providing Commission staff access to e-Tag data) was implemented to provide the Commission, Market Monitoring Units (MMUs), Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs), and Independent System Operators (ISOs) with information that allows them to perform market surveillance and analysis more effectively. The e-Tag information is necessary to understand the use of the interconnected electricity grid, particularly transactions occurring at interchanges. Due to the nature of the electricity grid, an individual transaction’s impact on an interchange cannot be assessed adequately in all cases without information from all connected systems, which is included in the e-Tags. The details of the physical path of a transaction included in the e-Tags helps the Commission to monitor, in particular, interchange transactions effectively, detect and prevent price manipulation over interchanges, and ensure the efficient and orderly use of the transmission grid. For example, the e-Tag data allows the Commission to identify transmission reservations as they go from one market to another and link the market participants involved in that transaction. Order No. 771 provided the Commission access to e-Tags by requiring that Purchasing-Selling Entities (PSEs) and Balancing Authorities (BAs), list the Commission on the "CC" list of e-Tags so that the Commission can receive a copy of the e-Tags. The Commission accesses the e-Tags by contracting with a commercial vendor, OATI. In early 2014, the North American Energy Standards Board (NAESB) incorporated the requirement that the Commission be added to the “CC” list on e-Tags as part of the tagging process. Even before NAESB added the FERC requirement to the tagging standards, the rules behind the "CC" list requirement had already been programmed into the industry standard tagging software so as to make the inclusion of FERC in the "CC" list automatic. The Commission expects that PSEs and BAs will continue to use existing, automated procedures to create and validate the e-Tags in a way that provides the Commission with access to them. In the rare event that a new BA would need to alert e-Tag administrators that certain tags it generates qualify for exemption under the Commission’s regulations (e.g., transmissions from a new Canadian BA into another Canadian BA), this administrative function would be expected to require less than an hour of effort total from both the BA and an e-Tag administrator to include the BA on the exemption list. New exempt BAs occur less frequently than every year, but for the purpose of estimation we will conservatively assume one appears each year creating an additional burden associated with the Commission’s FERC-740 requirement of $65.68. (The 30-day Notice was issued and posted on FERC's eLibrary on 5/22/2019. Placeholders are entered into the 30-day publication metadata here. On publication in the Federal Register, we can enter the correct FR metadata.).

The latest form for FERC-740, Availability of E-Tag Information to Commission Staff expires 2022-11-30 and can be found here.