The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Thursday rejected PSEG’s challenge to PJM’s procedure for selecting new transmission projects, saying the company had failed to prove that PJM’s methodology was “tantamount to black box decision-making.”
PSEG had asked the commission to reconsider its November 29 order accepting revisions to PJM’s Operating Agreement that clarified how the RTO will use sensitivity studies, modeling assumptions and scenario planning analyses in developing its Regional Transmission Expansion Plan (RTEP).
PSEG asked FERC to require PJM to provide more details on how it will decide what scenarios to utilize and how to weight them.
The commission said, however, that PJM’s revisions “strike an appropriate balance between the need for PJM to maintain some flexibility … and the need for sufficient detail in the tariff to allow stakeholders to participate in the planning process.
“The process is not a `black box’ but an open and transparent process into which PSEG and all PJM stakeholders have the opportunity to provide input,” the commission ruled.
FERC also rejected PSEG’s request for additional safeguards to maintain cost controls market efficiency transmission projects modified as a result of sensitivity and scenario analyses. The commission noted that the revised agreement did not eliminate the cost benefit test that such projects must pass before approval.
PSEG did “not provide any concrete examples of how a lack of `limits to the extent to which an existing reliability or market efficiency project may be modified as a result of sensitivity and scenario studies’ puts PJM’s cost control measures at risk,” the commission said.
PSEG also requested that PJM align its RTEP process with the design of its forward capacity market, saying PJM’s “generation-related assumptions” in the RTEP should “be the same as the assumptions underlying the various [capacity] auctions.”
The commission rejected that request as outside the scope of the proceeding. It said PSEG should raise such questions within PJM’s stakeholder process or through a separate section 206 complaint to the commission.
