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Voltus agreed to pay a $10.9 million penalty and return $7.1 million in profits to settle allegations that it registered uncontracted and over-stated demand response resources with the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, according to a settlement approved Monday by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Also, the demand response company’s former CEO Gregg Dixon engaged in a “fraudulent scheme” in MISO, in part by directing Voltus employees to obtain customer data by scraping an Ameren Illinois website, FERC said.
Dixon agreed to pay a $1 million penalty and to step down from Voltus’ board of directors.
FERC’s enforcement office contends Dixon caused Voltus to register demand response resources with MISO without the owners’ knowledge or consent and to clear load-modifying resource capacity that would not have performed if MISO dispatched the resources from Oct. 1, 2016, through June 1, 2020, according to the agreement.
Voltus and Dixon stipulated to the facts in the agreement, but neither admitted nor denied the alleged violations. Voltus and Dixon fully cooperated during FERC’s investigation, the agency said.
“We have not been accused of, let alone admit to, any market manipulation,” Voltus said in an emailed statement. “Rather, we are entering a no-admit/no-deny settlement on tariff violations … Voltus will continue to work with regulators, including FERC, to ensure that tariffs that govern demand-side resources are clear and consistently applied.”
Voltus, with more than 7 GW of distributed energy resources under its control, operates in all nine organized wholesale markets in North America, according to the company. Since it started in 2016, Voltus said it has paid its customers more than $175 million through their participation in wholesale markets.
In MISO, Voltus aggregates retail customers to provide the grid operator with “load modifying resources” and “emergency demand resources,” according to FERC. Voltus became the first retail aggregator to participate in MISO’s markets when it took part in the 2017/18 planning resource auction.
At that time, MISO didn’t require companies like Voltus to show they had a contractual relationship with the entities providing the load modifying resources they were registering, according to FERC.
As part of its sales process, Voltus received utility bills from potential customers. At Dixon’s direction, Voltus employees used account numbers from the bills to gain access to their accounts at Ameren Illinois, according to FERC.