FERC on Dec. 5 approved a settlement between its Office of Enforcement and Public Service Electric and Gas imposing a $6.6 million civil penalty on the utility for allegedly “failing to fully and accurately provide information” to PJM about a project to rebuild its 230-kV Roseland-Pleasant Valley (RPV) transmission line (IN21-5).
The $546 million project was included in PJM’s 2018 Regional Transmission Expansion Plan (RTEP) after PSE&G determined the line had reached the end of its useful life. That determination was supported by presentations staff made to PJM that stated external consultants found that hundreds of steel lattice towers exceeded 95 to 100% of their loading capability and dozens had “foundations requiring extensive reconstruction.”
According to the approved agreement, those presentations did not specify that the consultants were directed to use an assumption that 10% of the steel on the towers had eroded away and omitted 12 pages of another consultant report from 2013 that found no tower foundations in need of replacement. The utility also did not provide PJM with a 2016 report finding a smaller number of foundations were in need of rebuilding.
“The relevant PSE&G external consultant’s Jan. 12, 2016, report would have informed PJM directly from such consultant materials that such consultant found a total of only eight towers on the Branchburg-to-Pleasant Valley segment of the RPV line to have one or more legs with foundation condition D — wherein the precise words ‘complete failure of concrete foundation requiring extensive engineered foundation reconstruction’ were used by PSE&G’s external consultant,” FERC said. “PSE&G did not provide to PJM the external consultant report.”
In a statement to RTO Insider, PSE&G said, “RPV is a needed part of the PJM transmission system. Before it was rebuilt, it was one of the oldest lines on PJM’s system, with 90% of its towers being built between 1927 and 1930. We have worked cooperatively with FERC in their review and have implemented processes to ensure such issues do not arise again.
“FERC did not challenge the end-of-life determination that determined the need to rebuild the RPV line to ensure reliability and system benefits such as enhanced reliability. FERC’s review found that there were inaccuracies in materials that were provided to PJM as part of the approval process in 2017.”
In an email, PJM spokesperson Susan Buehler told RTO Insider, “PJM relies on information provided to us by asset owners to make important decisions that impact the power system and consumer costs. That information must be precise and truthful, and action taken by the FERC in this matter reaffirms this principle.”
Presentations the utility made to PJM before the project was accepted into the RTEP said that 67 towers had “foundations requiring extensive reconstruction,” but consultants recommended leg foundation rehabilitation for just eight towers. In discussions with FERC investigators, PSE&G said it included 59 towers with foundations that the consultant recommended for “repair via replacement or reinforcement.”
Estimates were also provided to PJM about the number of towers that exceeded loading capabilities, but PSE&G did not disclose that those figures were mathematically derived based on assumptions about steel erosion, rather than inspections of the infrastructure. That assumption was itself based on “extrapolation of corrosion measurements made by another external consultant who had actually inspected and measured towers in the field.” PSE&G reported that 221 towers exceeded 95% of their loading capability and 143 exceeded 100% based on those assumptions, but the consultant found that only 75 exceeded 95% of their loading capability and only four exceeded 100%.
The agreement also states that PSE&G did not raise the possibility of repairing the towers, nor provided examples of similar work that the utility routinely conducts. It notes that specifying costs is not required by the RTEP process.
“For instance, the relevant PSE&G external consultant’s 2016 report identified eight steel lattice towers having a total of 10 legs in foundation condition D — i.e., ‘requiring extensive engineered foundation reconstruction.’ PSE&G routinely paid such external consultant to perform such work for a cost on the order of $20,000 to $40,000 per concrete leg foundation,” FERC said.
