FERC last week granted a wind farm developer’s second request for a waiver from SPP’s generator interconnection procedures that will allow the RTO to evaluate an alternative interconnection point in the generator interconnection agreement, drawing a dissent from two commissioners (ER21-1023).

In its April 26 order, the commission said that while it’s “hesitant” to grant waivers allowing transmission providers to study an interconnection customer’s alternative point of interconnection (POI), it found that the developer, Thunderhead Wind Energy, had met the criteria.

Thunderhead said it had built a 300-MW wind facility in Nebraska to be interconnected to Nebraska Public Power District’s system at the terminus of the utility’s delayed R-Project, a new 222-mile, 345-kV line. SPP approved the project in 2012 with a 2019 in-service date, but it has yet to receive the needed regulatory approvals.

NPPD issued a force majeure notice for the original GIA in February 2019. SPP conducted a pair of studies that indicated Thunderhead could still interconnect to a substation at the terminus point but at a reduced output. However, last June, the U.S. District Court for Colorado vacated the R-Project’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service permit, leading NPPD to suspend the substation’s construction.

FERC denied Thunderhead’s previous waiver request last year. It acknowledged that the delay was not the developer’s fault and that it had incurred “large financial expenditures,” but it said it was “unclear” as to whether granting the request would “resolve the problem … or significantly reduce the financial harm.”

This time, the commission found the developer had acted in good faith and that the waiver was limited in scope, addressed a concrete problem and did not harm third parties.

“Granting the requested waiver will allow SPP to study Thunderhead’s request for an alternative POI and determine whether such a change would constitute a material modification,” FERC said. “Should SPP find, after study, that Thunderhead’s proposed change to its POI constitutes a material modification … Thunderhead must submit a new interconnection request should it wish to pursue such a modification.”

SPP did not opposed the order. NPPD, Basin Electric Power Cooperative and the Western Area Power Administration joined SPP as intervenors.

Commissioners Neil Chatterjee and James Danly dissented from the order.

Chatterjee said FERC “got it right the first time” and that the “nearly identical record here does not support a completely different result.”

“As a general matter, I favor a flexible, case-by-case approach to waivers to cure administrative or other similar, limited errors that arise under complex tariff processes,” he wrote. “However, I disagree that the commission should use its waiver authority to relieve an interconnection customer of process uncertainties — especially here, where the timing uncertainties and potential for delays are specifically described in Thunderhead’s executed [GIA].”

Danly said Thunderhead’s request was not materially different from its initial request and should be rejected for “similar reasons.”

“My concern … is that it is usually a mistake to assess waivers concerning interconnection requests in isolation,” he said. “Interconnection queues, especially in RTOs, are long. They have significant backlogs. The management of these queues requires hard and fast rules applied consistently, even when they cause hardship. This is the case with respect to the tariff provision at issue here, which provides that changes in a POI are definitionally material modifications, absent exceptions not applicable here.”