NEPOOL Reliability Committee Briefs: Dec. 14, 2021

The Bay State Wind project will include 80 11-MW turbines south of Martha's Vineyard, Mass. | Ørsted, Eversource Energy

Dec 16, 2021

The NEPOOL Reliability Committee approved the Bay State Wind project’s request to increase its capacity by 40 MW, reflecting a move to larger turbines.

Bay State Wind Project Wins OK for Larger Turbines

The NEPO Reliability Committee on Tuesday approved the Bay State Wind project’s request to increase its capacity by 40 MW, reflecting a move to larger turbines.

The committee found no negative reliability impacts resulting from Bay State’s proposed array of 80 11-MW turbines south of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. The project, a joint venture of Ørsted and Eversource Energy (NYSE:ES), is scheduled to reach commercial service in May 2026.

The committee also signed off on transmission applications for the project including:

installation of two 140-MVAr synchronous condensers connected via 345/24-kV transformers;
construction of a 345/275-kV onshore substation;
installation and interconnection of two 275-kV submarine, landfall and land cable circuits;
installation of two 275/66-kV off-shore substations;
installation and interconnection of two 345-kV buried land cable circuits interconnecting at the Brayton Point 345-kV and Bay State Wind 345/275-kV onshore substations.

Order 2222 Compliance, Procedure Changes Approved

The committee also approved:

changes to Planning Procedure 10 (Planning Procedure to Support the Forward Capacity Market), including conforming changes for ER21-640, related to qualification of non-commercial resources in annual reconfiguration auctions, and ER19-343, related to the modeling of peaking generation in reliability reviews;
tariff revisions regarding auditing and installed capacity requirements as part of ISO-NE’s compliance with FERC Order 2222, which allows aggregations of distributed energy resources to participate in the RTO’s markets; the compliance filing is due Feb. 2, 2022;
changes to Operating Procedure 16K (Transmission System Data – Submission of Short Circuit Data), part of a biennial review with minor updates to process flow diagram; and
changes to Operating Procedure 3 (Transmission Outage Scheduling), part of biennial review with minor edits and grammatical revisions.

Other Projects

The committee also determined no negative reliability impacts from the following projects:

installation of a 200MW/400-MWh battery storage project in Milford, Conn., which will interconnect to a new 345-kV breaker position at the East Devon substation (Able Grid Infrastructure Holdings, Eversource Energy and United Illuminating);
installation of a 20-MW solar PV facility in Leeds, Maine, interconnecting to the Leeds Substation (Central Maine Power on behalf of Walden Solar Maine);
installation of a 4-MW solar PV facility in Putnam, Conn., interconnecting to the Tracy 14M Substation (Eversource Energy on behalf of Glenvale Solar); and
a generation group study for a 35.4-MW distributed energy resources project in the Winslow/County Road area and a 29.8-MW DER project in the Lakewood area of Maine. The generation clusters represent 20 DER facilities that would interconnect into Central Maine Power’s sub-transmission and distribution systems.

The committee approved the following cost allocations for pool transmission facilities:

$64.7 million of transmission upgrade costs for work associated with 115-kV and 230-kV wood structure replacement projects in Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire (Eversource);
$186.3 million for 345-kV structure replacement projects in Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire (Eversource);
$23.9 million for replacement of wood structures on the 1261/1598 115-kV line (Eversource).