A San Francisco-based renewable developer will get more time to prove it has secured enough land for its proposed wind farm in MISO East because of emergency conditions created by the COVID-19 pandemic, FERC ruled Thursday.
The commission granted Pattern Energy Wind Development’s waiver request of MISO generation interconnection procedures on the grounds that the ongoing pandemic hampered property plans for the Uplands Wind Project, a 600-MW wind farm in southern Wisconsin. The waiver will buy Pattern an extension on MISO’s current Nov. 27 deadline to prove site control and the Jan. 25 deadline for the grid operator to review site control submissions (ER21-30).
The Uplands project is part of the 2020 MISO East cycle of project hopefuls working their way through the RTO’s interconnection queue set to begin study on Feb. 24. Pattern submitted the project under two separate interconnection requests in June in order to connect it to both American Transmission Co.’s 345-kV Hill Valley-to-Cardinal line and the 345-kV Hill Valley substation.
Pattern said it experienced “business interruptions and delays in the land acquisition process caused by governmental orders, health and safety concerns and illness of key personnel resulting from COVID-19.”
The company said that even with business restrictions enacted in Wisconsin from March through May, its agents were able to “sign several thousand acres of land, despite not being able to take any in-person meetings.” However, Pattern said its title specialist became “severely ill in late July/early August 2020, and a land agent was hospitalized for an extended period in late August 2020.” The illnesses “made it difficult to maintain the consistent dialogue necessary to negotiate a land easement and then register the easement with the local authority,” Pattern said. The company said despite conducting outdoor meetings with township boards, landowners and nonprofits, it simply lost too much time to “establish site control for 30,000 acres of land by Nov. 27, 2020.”
FERC said Pattern’s existing 15,000 acres of site control showed that the developer has made “reasonable efforts to satisfy MISO’s site control requirements in a timely manner.”
MISO said it also supported Pattern’s request for extension.
