FERC on Thursday denied a complaint by Hecate Energy that Central Hudson Gas and Electric and NYISO violated tariff-defined interconnection procedures and thereby delayed its 20-MW solar generation project in Greene County, N.Y., saddling the project with $10 million in unnecessary system upgrade costs (EL21-49).

Hecate alleged that the utility and NYISO violated the Open Access Transmission Tariff (OATT) and the Federal Power Act by failing to use reasonable efforts to process the interconnection request for its Greene County 3 project and violated the FPA by applying an “inclusion practice” related to the firmness of generator interconnection requests not delineated in the OATT regarding queue position.  

Hecate argued that Central Hudson uses an “inclusion practice” to determine whether an interconnecting project in the queue is firm — that is, modeled in the base case for future projects for the purpose of queue coordination once the project has executed an interconnection agreement and has paid at least 25% of the project’s assigned interconnection costs.

Hecate said the actions of Central Hudson and NYISO resulted in six other projects becoming “firm” ahead of the Greene County projects, causing the interconnecting line to reach its 70 MVA rating and leaving the company to pay $10 million for upgrades.

The commission found that Hecate failed to satisfy its burden of proof under Section 206 of the FPA to demonstrate that respondents acted in an unjust or unreasonable manner, and said it “has explained that, while an RTO/ISO’s queue process may be intended to minimize delays, interconnection customers are not guaranteed that the RTO/ISO will meet its projected deadlines.”

The commission disagreed with Hecate’s “inclusion practice” argument and said it “has already determined in various proceedings if, and how, NYISO may take into account non-jurisdictional facilities that may affect the NYISO queue. Therefore, we find that the cases that Hecate points to in order to support its argument are misplaced and are distinguishable from the circumstances in this proceeding.”  

NYISO said that Hecate’s argument based on the total number of days was “conclusory and ignores the unique difficulties and challenges associated with the project’s proposed interconnection.” The ISO noted that in August 2016, Hecate submitted an interconnection request for a 50-MW facility, which it subsequently withdrew and split into three separate projects, one of which is the subject of its complaint.

The commission said “we find the time expended was not unreasonable in light of the study time frame in the NYISO OATT. In addition, as noted by the respondents, many of the delays were caused by Hecate itself.”