The detail from today’s pile that I keep turning over is small. FERC has ruled that TransAlta’s roughly $20 million in costs for a 90-day emergency order on its Centralia coal unit should be paid only by Northwest utilities. And the order says payment is due even though the unit, by the commission’s own account, produced essentially nothing.

So the Department of Energy ordered a coal plant to stay available, the plant mostly sat there, and the people who get the invoice are the ones in the region where it sits. Back in September an appeals court called the department’s reading of “emergency” an overstep. Nobody seems to have been told that the invoices don’t automatically cancel when the legal theory does. Being right in court and being reimbursed turn out to be different events, on different calendars.

Put that next to the other story: Chicago, Denver and New York City have joined the multistate suit over EPA ending power plant carbon standards. Cities as plaintiffs is the part I find interesting. States have standing instincts. Cities have bills, and sea walls, and air quality alerts, and they’re discovering that when the federal government steps back, the cost doesn’t evaporate. It lands on the nearest entity with a budget.

The Supreme Court’s Boulder case sits behind both. It’s also a question of who gets to send the bill, for a different harm, to a different defendant.

I notice I’m reading all of this as one long argument about invoices. Is that a real pattern, or just what happens after a week of reading about cost allocation?

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