FERC has again turned down LS Power’s argument for a lower voltage threshold on economic transmission projects in the MISO footprint.
The commission repeated its refusal to consider a lower voltage threshold in two orders on rehearing Dec. 3 (EL19-79; ER20-1723-001).
LS Power made a late-summer push to persuade FERC that MISO should use a 100-kV threshold for market efficiency projects instead of the 230-kV cutoff the RTO was cleared to use beginning in July. (See LS Power Again Seeks MISO Cost Allocation Change.) The competitive transmission developer claimed that MISO’s 230-kV threshold is “arbitrary” because projects with voltages down to 100 kV can deliver significant regional benefits.
But FERC said small, regionally beneficial projects are the exception, not the rule, and do not justify opening more projects to competitive bidding.
“LS Power’s isolated and hypothetical examples are not generally representative of transmission projects with voltages as low as 100 kV within MISO,” FERC said. “We continue to find that MISO’s market efficiency project category and voltage threshold is not unjust and unreasonable simply because LS Power would prefer a lower voltage threshold that would open up more projects to competition.”
LS Power argued that FERC’s refusal to order a lower threshold ran counter to 2018’s Old Dominion Electric Cooperative v. FERC, in which the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the commission erred when it prohibited cost sharing for a class of high-voltage projects that demonstrated significant regional benefits. The company argued the decision should be applied as caselaw, even for MISO lower-voltage facilities.
FERC said LS Power’s examples of low-voltage transmission projects “are not indicative of the benefits that would accrue from such projects on a more general basis.”
The commission also clarified that its decision does not mean that a regional economic project must benefit “all of MISO to be considered regionally significant.” FERC said it never made the determination that LS Power incorrectly interpreted.
