with FERC about unfair treatment under the new open access requirements. The complaints generally followed the same theme: vertically integrated electric utility companies would favor their own affiliated power marketing division over external parties trying to move power on the system. In many cases, the power marketers operated side by side with the transmission operators (or it might even be the same person) and there were no rules to prevent unfair treatment of external transmission system users. FERC Orders 888 and 889 To protect and promote generation competition and also enforce fair treatment of external users of the transmission system, FERC issued Order 888 and Order 889 on April 24, 1996. The EPAct of 1992 was the beginning of electric deregulation in North America, but Orders 888 and 889 marked the point where the trading of electricity gained a firm foothold. Order 888, the "Open Access" order Order 888's primary objective was to establish and promote competition in the generation market, by ensuring fair access and market treatment of transmission customers. FERC outlined six points to accomplish this goal: Require all jurisdictional utilities (within the United States) to file an open-access transmission tariff (OATT) Require investor-owned utilities (IOU's) to functionally unbundle wholesale generation and power marketing from transmission services Create Independent System Operators (ISO's) and operating guidelines Encourage reciprocity for non-jurisdictional (i.e., municipalities and cooperatives) utilities Allow utilities to recover stranded costs Identify ancillary services and comparable services to properly operate the bulk power system One fairly immediate result of this order was the functional separation and isolation of the power schedulers and power marketers within vertically integrated utilities from their company's area of transmission operations. Affiliated power marketers could no longer work alongside the transmission operators who were charged with treating them and external parties equally, and at the same time affiliated power marketers would no longer have any "inside information" on the availability of the transmission system nor the transactions being scheduled on it. Order 889, the "Standards of Conduct" order Order 889 went to great lengths to detail exactly how all participants in the electricity market should interact with transmission providers. It laid out the structure and function of what became known as OASIS "nodes," which are secure, web-based interfaces to each transmission system's market offerings and transmission availability announcements. Each OASIS node was to be the single point of information dissemination to the market as well