FERC on Thursday denied a request from Green Mountain Power for a waiver of ISO-NE’s revised definition of settlement-only resources, saying the Vermont utility failed to show its request would be “limited in scope” and “not have undesirable consequences” (ER20-1755).

Green Mountain had sought a waiver from the revised definition, which will be effective Jan. 1, for its Searsburg wind power facility in southern Vermont, which went online in July 1997. Without the waiver, Green Mountain said it will have to register as a non-settlement-only resource and comply with the RTO’s dispatch requirements.

But Green Mountain said its 11 Zond Energy Systems turbines cannot be operated remotely because the project was installed before the availability of supervisory control and data acquisition technology for wind facilities, and it is unable to acquire hardware or software to set up an active power limit because the turbines are among the last of its type still in operation. As a result, the power output of the facility can only be limited manually by taking individual turbines offline or shutting down the entire facility remotely by tripping the substation, which could damage the turbines, the company said.

FERC said Green Mountain failed to demonstrate that its waiver request was limited in scope and “span a specific and limited period of time.” The company said it expects to decommission individual turbines at Searsburg “within the coming years” but did not provide a specific decommissioning date.

The commission rejected Green Mountain’s argument that the waiver request was limited in scope because it would involve only the settlement-only resource Tariff provisions.

Although Searsburg has a nameplate rating of 6 MW, Green Mountain said the facility has only a 20 to 25% capacity factor and produces an average of 1.2 to 1.5 MW.

“Green Mountain claims, without further explanation, that any harm would be minor due to the small size of its facility, but the fact that a facility is small does not alone sufficiently demonstrate that a waiver would have no undesirable consequences,” FERC said.