FERC on Thursday rejected without prejudice four unexecuted generator interconnection agreements (GIAs) filed by SPP, finding that the RTO had not shown the agreements with four proposed wind farms to be just and reasonable (ER19-2747, et al.).
The commission found the allocation of costs for a shared network upgrade under each of the GIAs should not have been included because a restudy of the interconnection requests determined the upgrade was no longer needed and would not be built.
The Emporia upgrade “is no longer a ‘but for’ facility that is needed for the interconnection” of the affected interconnection customers, FERC said.
The four interconnection customers, all wind farms in Oklahoma and Kansas, submitted their requests to SPP before a 2016 deadline to be included in a study queue. The RTO performed five restudies following the initial study, one of which identified a shared network upgrade necessary to accommodate the wind farms. The fifth restudy concluded that the upgrade was no longer needed because of the pending development of the Wolf Creek-Blackberry competitive transmission project, approved by SPP’s Board of Directors in January.
SPP filed the GIAs in September. The requests were filed as unexecuted because the wind farms disagreed with the proposed cost allocation provisions.
The RTO told FERC it is revising the unexecuted GIAs to reflect the fifth restudy’s results and that none of the GIAs have been executed by the wind farms.
The proposed wind farms are Frontier Windpower (141.8 MW), Skeleton Creek Wind (250 MW), Wheatbelt Wind (220 MW) and Chilocco Wind Farm (200.1 MW).
The Wolf Creek-Blackberry project, a $152 million, 105-mile, 345-kV upgrade project in Kansas and Missouri, was approved as part of the SPP’s 2020 Transmission Expansion Plan. (See “Directors Approve $545M Transmission Expansion Plan,” SPP Board of Directors/MC Briefs: Jan. 28, 2020.)
