Opinion ID: 726048
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Commission's Jurisdiction over MichCon and MGU

Text: 60 Before the Commission reconsidered its position regarding interest, it required Panhandle and Trunkline to refund both principal and interest to MichCon and MGU. Upon reconsideration, the Commission ordered MichCon and MGU to refund the interest portion of that payment, with interest. MichCon and MGU argue that the Commission had no power to issue that order because their contractual relationships with Panhandle and Trunkline had expired by then. 61 The Customers see no jurisdictional impediment to the Commission's having ordered Panhandle and Trunkline to refund principal and interest to them even though that order also came after the contractual relationships had expired. The significant difference, they say, is that the first order required a refund of charges unlawfully collected during the contractual relationship, whereas the second imposed a surcharge based upon past sales service. 62 [320 U.S.App.D.C. 386] That distinction cannot help the Customers in light of our decision in Natural Gas Clearinghouse v. FERC, 965 F.2d 1066, 1073 (1992), where we held that the Commission's remedial authority to undo the effect of its past legal error includes the authority to impose a retroactive surcharge (that does not violate the filed rate doctrine) as well as to extract a retroactive refund. Here the Commission has in effect imposed a retroactive surcharge based upon the Pipelines' entitlement to recover production-related costs through the PGA after 1985--an entitlement forgone in reliance upon the Commission's erroneous policy at that time. That surcharge does not violate the filed rate doctrine (and the Customers have not argued that it does) because, in 1985, the Customers had notice that the Pipelines were attempting to recover their production-related costs and knew that the Pipelines could do so through the PGA.