By Michael Kuser

FERC on Wednesday denied CPower’s two waiver requests to allow its seven summer-only distributed solar demand capacity resources to participate in ISO-NE’s Forward Capacity Auction 14 and substitution auction held last week (ER20-458).

FCA 14 cleared 33,956 MW of capacity for 2023/24 after five rounds of bidding. (See related story, ISO-NE Capacity Prices Hit Record Low.)

CPower argued that its resources could not participate in FCA 14 and the substitution Competitive Auctions with Policy Sponsored Resources (CASPR) auction because the RTO’s Tariff requires such qualified capacity to be the lesser of those resources’ summer-only or winter-only qualified capacity.

Under ISO-NE rules, demand capacity resources must submit a composite offer (i.e., partly summer capacity and partly winter) into the auction because they have a 0-MW winter qualified capacity; without such an offer, these resources would have a default FCA qualified capacity of 0 MW.

In response, CPower elected to qualify for the FCA 14 under the renewable technology resource (RTR) exemption, which allows a limited amount of renewables to participate in the auction without being subject to the RTO’s minimum offer price rule. Next year’s auction will be the last to include the RTR.

For each auction, the combined capacity for resources under the RTR exemption has a set megawatt cap, which was exceeded for FCA 14, prompting the RTO to prorate the exemption among resources that qualified for it.

CPower sought to submit the summer-only qualified capacity for FCA 14 at the Internal Market Monitor’s mitigated — or offer floor — price. The company noted that the Tariff does not permit composite offers to be prorated under the RTR exemption when the cap is reached. Alternatively, CPower sought a waiver to allow it to withdraw from its election of the RTR exemption and make composite offers for summer-only and winter-only qualified capacity.

ISO-NE protested the first waiver request but not the alternate.

In rejecting the primary request, the commission said CPower was seeking “to shield its resources from the consequences of its choices and the same risks that other demand capacity resources face in qualifying for FCA 14.”

The commission also ruled that the alternate waiver “would shield only CPower’s demand capacity resources from the risk that proration may apply when selecting” the RTR exemption, and that the company “does not demonstrate why its resources should be offered the opportunity to opt out … once proration results are known, when no other resource has that choice.”

Commissioner Richard Glick dissented on the commission’s rejection of the alternate request, saying that “without a waiver, the FCA will categorically ignore the capacity that [CPower] resources provide.”

“Unless the commission is prepared to categorically reject all waiver requests, the potential for differential treatment is not a reasoned basis for denying the alternate waiver request,” Glick said. “Moreover, the fact that the [request] applies only to CPower’s resources would seem to support CPower’s request, not to undermine it. If the request applied to all resources that elected the RTR exemption, then it might very well not be limited in scope.”

In a similar proceeding, the commission last week denied Genbright a waiver for 14 of its distributed generation projects to avoid what the company claimed was a “complex interconnection study process.” (See related story, FERC Rejects Genbright Waiver on FCA14.)