FERC on Thursday granted San Diego Gas & Electric a waiver allowing it to continue the CAISO interconnection study process for its proposed Top Gun Energy Storage project without having to post financial security to itself.

In its June 21 order (ER18-1360), the commission said it found that SDG&E acted in good faith, that the waiver request was of limited scope and addressed a concrete problem, and that granting it would have no undesirable consequences.

Because the utility is both the primary transmission owner (PTO) and the interconnection customer, the commission found it unnecessary for it to post financial security to protect itself from the risk of the project being abandoned after associated network upgrades have been undertaken.

For SDG&E to perform accounting entries to move money from one intracompany account to another intracompany account “in this case serves no useful purpose,” the commission said.

— Michael Kuser