FERC last week approved Vistra Corp.’s request to bypass MISO’s generator interconnection procedures to quickly add battery storage projects at two retiring fossil fuel plants (ER22-2632).
Vistra was seeking a waiver of MISO’s replacement generator rules so it could add 37-MW battery storage projects to partially replace output at two power plants in Illinois: its Joppa Power Plant, owned by the company’s Electric Energy Inc. subsidiary, and the Edwards Power Plant.
Ordinarily under its replacement generation rules, MISO requires the same generation owner to assume ownership of existing interconnection rights for a new facility. In its Nov. 8 order, FERC permitted Vistra to circumvent that requirement and allowed two subsidiaries — Joppa BESS (Battery Energy Storage Systems) and Edwards BESS — to assume the existing rights without entering the RTO’s interconnection queue.
Vistra explained that the storage ownership should remain separate because the projects’ investors did not bargain for liability of retiring fossil fuel generation. FERC agreed and said Vistra requested the one-time waiver in good faith.
“We find that Vistra’s request does not raise queue-jumping concerns because the necessary transfers do not involve unaffiliated entities outside of the interconnection queue, and Vistra pledges that Joppa BESS and Edwards BESS will maintain ownership until the energy storage facilities reach commercial operation, consistent with the transferability restriction,” the commission said.
Joppa, with six coal units totaling 948 MW of capacity and five gas units with 239 MW of capacity, closed in September. The 560-MW coal-fired Edwards facility is slated to idle Jan. 1. Both plants are closing to settle complaints of excessive pollution brought forward by environmental organizations.
Vistra is developing the storage projects under Illinois’ Coal-to-Solar Energy Storage Grant Program, part of the state’s Climate and Equitable Jobs Act. The company will receive $81 million over 10 years to build the two facilities, which are supposed to enter commercial operation no later than June 1, 2025, in order to stay grant-eligible.
Vistra said if it had been forced to enter the projects into MISO’s generator interconnection queue, it would miss the grant deadline. It currently takes about three years for a generator to complete the queue, though MISO is working to minimize the wait.
In a concurrence, FERC Commissioner Allison Clements said the “effect of granting this waiver is that a brownfield site of existing generation on the transmission system can be expeditiously re-used.”
Clements called for a re-examination of RTO rules that restrict a generation owner’s ability to hand over their interconnection rights to unaffiliated entities. She said the waiver “highlights the increasingly strained reasoning underpinning the transferability restrictions in MISO’s and other transmission providers’ generator replacement rules.”
“No part of those rules is more in need of reconsideration than these transferability restrictions, which, at best, appear to impede beneficial commercial transactions and, at worst, may unduly discriminate against non-incumbent generation owners,” Clements wrote.
