By Amanda Durish Cook

FERC last week rejected a request to rehear its October 2016 ruling requiring MISO to revise its interconnection fees, saying the treatment of external generator Manitoba Hydro was beyond the scope of the order (EL16-12-002, et al.).

The commission had ordered MISO to apply milestone payments equally across all classes of customers, prompting the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) and Wind on the Wires (WOW) to question how the RTO is processing 3,500 MW of external generation from Manitoba Hydro. The wind advocates claimed sales of Manitoba Hydro’s generation were allowed onto the system under a firm transmission service right, thus circumventing milestone payments.

The arrangement equated to preferential treatment, the two said, and asked FERC to determine under what Tariff provision MISO allows Manitoba Hydro sales. They said Exelon’s 3,500 MW of external generation is processed under interconnection service and external network resource interconnection service (E-NRIS), which now requires milestone payments.

In rejecting the rehearing request Thursday, FERC said AWEA and WOW could raise their concerns in MISO’s stakeholder process or submit a fresh complaint to the commission.

The commission said last year’s order centered on which classes of interconnection customers must make milestone payments and is not focused on an “overbroad interpretation” of the “terms and conditions of transmission service in specific transactions involving MISO and Manitoba Hydro, which are outside the scope of this proceeding.”

The October 2016 order stemmed from a complaint by a group of internal MISO generators who contested the RTO’s practice of exempting external generating resources from paying a significant fee levied on any new internal resources seeking to enter the final stage of the interconnection process. (See FERC Orders MISO to Levy Interconnection Fees Equally.) At the outset of the definitive planning phase, new MISO interconnection customers within the footprint must make an M2 milestone payment to fund impact studies and cost analysis. MISO had waived the fee for both new and existing generators outside its footprint under the assumption that those resources have already established interconnection agreements within their own balancing areas.

MISO applied the new rules required by last year’s order to two service agreements: 30 MW of E-NRIS from Exelon’s Fairless Hills Power Plant in Pennsylvania and 2,300 MW of E-NRIS from Exelon’s Byron Nuclear Facility in Illinois (ER17-1000, ER17-1013). FERC accepted both on Thursday.

AWEA and WOW had protested acceptance of the service agreements, arguing that Manitoba’s large external service agreement earned a 147-page reliability study result from MISO, and an analysis of Exelon’s external generation only yielded an 18-page result. The two said the reports contained “insufficient data to confirm MISO’s conclusion that there are no reliability and deliverability violations and that no network upgrades are needed to accommodate the new 2,330 MW.” FERC said the claims were unsubstantiated.