By William Opalka

FERC on Wednesday sided with a Long Island power plant developer in its dispute with NYISO over interconnection standards the ISO sought to apply to the company’s proposed 750-MW combined-cycle facility (EL15-84).

The developer of Caithness Long Island II filed a complaint July 10 claiming that NYISO’s application of a local reliability requirement violates its Tariff and FERC Order 2003.

Caithness sought to prevent NYISO from applying the Long Island local reliability interface transfer capability test to identify required system upgrades as part of its interconnection facilities study.

“We find that the Long Island guideline constitutes a deliverability test and therefore using it to identify system upgrade facilities is inconsistent with Order No. 2003 and violates the [Tariff],” FERC wrote.

Order 2003 requires transmission providers to offer two levels of interconnection service: energy resource interconnection service (ERIS) and network resource interconnection service (NRIS). ERIS is a minimal interconnection service and NRIS is a more flexible service for resources that seek to be designated network resources or capacity resources.

To obtain NRIS, the interconnection customer has to satisfy a deliverability test to ensure that its generating facility can be operated simultaneously at peak load along with other generators in the same electrical area and that any output produced above the area’s peak load requirements can be transmitted to other locations on the transmission provider’s system.

The Caithness II project in Brookhaven has proposed an interconnection with the Long Island Power Authority. Caithness had requested basic ERIS service.

Caithness complained that NYISO’s Long Island guideline would allow transmission owners to act unilaterally to cause “an unjustifiable increase in interconnection costs measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars” for the project.

FERC agreed, saying the guideline is “impermissible because it creates a conflict with the NYISO minimum interconnection standard by imposing a deliverability requirement on a project requesting energy-only interconnection under ERIS.”

While NRIS studies are required to identify network upgrades needed to allow the generator to contribute to meeting the overall capacity needs of the control area or planning region, ERIS studies are not, FERC said.