WASHINGTON — The Energy Bar Association’s Northeast Chapter held its annual meeting last week in a small conference room within the offices of law firm Baker Botts. Members discussed the state of the offshore wind industry, RTO analyses of fuel security and the ongoing tension between markets and state policies. FERC Commissioner Richard Glick gave a keynote luncheon talk.

Here’s some of what we heard Thursday.

Transmission for Offshore Wind

The Northeast has a combined goal of 21.9 GW in offshore wind procurements, a number only expected to grow as Maine and Delaware both consider their targets, and New Jersey contemplates upping its own.

Transmission planning on land is already challenging enough for RTOs. The nature of offshore wind facilities make planning their interconnections even more so.

John Marczewski, vice president of utilities and consulting for EN Engineering, gave an overview of the physical challenges. Each turbine in a wind farm connects to a collection substation in the ocean. “Substation engineers are not used to building electrical substations that sit on, effectively, what is an oil platform,” he said. “A lot of design challenges [are] involved in that.”

From the collection station, an underwater transmission line runs to a substation on land. The distance from the shore also presents design difficulties. An AC line is typically limited to 600 MW and 35 miles per circuit, so more circuits need to be added to transmit more power. Alternatively, designers could opt to use a DC line, but both the off- and onshore substations would need to be equipped with AC converters.

“It’s very hard to actually get … cables from platforms out in the ocean to these interconnection points,” said Theodore Paradise, senior vice president of transmission strategy for Anbaric. “There isn’t unlimited space across the ocean floor.” He advised using HVDC systems, not only because adding more AC lines requires more trenching and thus harms the ocean environment, but because it’s more expensive.

Tackling Fuel Security

Matt White, ISO-NE’s chief economist, reminded the audience of the RTO’s chief concern: During extended periods of extreme cold, natural gas pipelines become severely constrained, and building heating gets priority over fuel for electricity generation, resulting in about half the RTO’s gas generators simply not being able to run.

“If you went to much of this country and told the system operator, ‘Half your gas generators can’t get fuel,’ they would say, ‘The lights are out,’” White said. “Today we’re making this work — for now.”

Like the rest of the U.S., renewable resources are growing in New England. “And if the renewables produced high levels of output all the time when the weather was cold, we’d probably have no problem,” he said. But in the winter, the region is “latitudinally challenged” when it comes to solar, and wind output is highly variable.

White then went over the details of ISO-NE’s proposal, ordered by FERC after it allowed the RTO to enter a cost-of-service agreement with Exelon to keep its 2,274-MW Mystic plant running. The proposal, due Oct. 15, was rejected by the New England Power Pool in March. In May, FERC agreed to hold a public prefiling meeting with the RTO, NEPOOL and the New England States Committee on Electricity. (See related story, NEPOOL MC Debates Energy Security Models.)

Glick: FERC Creating Legal Risks, Uncertainty

FERC commissioners remain entrenched in their positions on emissions, and they have yet to rule on PJM’s capacity market proposal. Each issue is generating legal risks for natural gas infrastructure developers and the RTO, respectively, Glick said.

“The courts have twice now told us … that when those [emissions] effects are reasonably foreseeable … we have to consider that as well” in an environmental impact statement, Glick said, referring to the D.C. Circuit’s 2017 Sabal Trail decision and a more recent decision earlier this month.

On June 4, a three-judge D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals panel upheld FERC’s approval of a compressor station in Tennessee as part of Tennessee Gas Pipeline’s Broad Run Expansion Project, though not without scolding the commission for failing to ask the company for data on downstream effects of the station.

The plaintiffs — local activists represented by former FERC attorney Carolyn Elefant — argued that the commission violated the National Environmental Policy Act by not considering those effects. But the court said it was forced to reject the complaint on procedural grounds, as the plaintiffs did not argue that FERC’s failure to seek the data violated the law.

While FERC argued that asking for such information “would be an exercise in futility,” the court countered that “We are troubled, as we were in the upstream-effects context, by the commission’s attempt to justify its decision to discount downstream impacts based on its lack of information.”

“What we’re really doing to pipeline developers is we’re creating an enormous amount of legal risk,” Glick said. He noted that the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has prevented the construction of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline because the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service “essentially didn’t cross their t’s and dot their i’s, and I think that’s what we’re doing here.”

“At some point, the courts are going to be clear and say, ‘Nope, FERC, we’re sending that back to you; you have to consider it again.’”

Glick also elaborated on the comments he made on Capitol Hill regarding PJM’s capacity proposal the day before. (See related story, FERC Probed on RTO Governance, Market Issues.)

FERC has found that PJM’s current capacity market rules are unjust and unreasonable. If PJM runs its Base Residual Auction in August “under those same terms and conditions,” Glick said, “my question is — and I don’t know the full answer to this, but I think the courts would say, ‘How could that auction be just and reasonable…?’

“We’ve done a great disservice, not only to PJM itself, but to a lot of the stakeholders who are either participating in the auction or are going to be impacted by the auction, because we’ve created a great level of uncertainty.”