By Suzanne Herel

Dayton Power & Light is protesting a $106 million transmission project by Dominion Resources under PJM’s 2015 Regional Transmission Expansion Plan because of a change in how the project’s costs will be allocated (ER15-1344).

The 500-kV Cunningham-Elmont end-of-life project (Project b2582) initially was designated a supplemental proposal, for which Dominion, as the incumbent utility, would bear the full cost.

“That was the correct designation for this project because it is simply a replacement for an existing transmission line for which Dominion has always had 100% cost responsibility,” DP&L said in a March 24 filing with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

But after changing its local planning criteria last year, Dominion asked PJM to study the need for the project and received permission to change its designation to baseline, categorizing it as a new line and allowing Dominion to export more than half of its expense.

The new allocation scheme will charge DP&L about $1 million, the Ohio utility said, noting that larger PJM stakeholders such as Commonwealth Edison and American Electric Power will be expected to pay six to seven times that much. While AEP has filed a motion to intervene in the case, DP&L is the only entity to have submitted a protest.

The Dominion project was described as a supplemental project in a reliability analysis update at PJM’s July 10, 2013, Transmission Expansion Advisory Committee.

The criteria PJM used to redefine the transmission project, DP&L said, “was not developed by PJM for consistent application across PJM, but was instead based solely on ‘Dominion Planning Criteria.’ In other words, Dominion’s unilateral change of its own criteria for construction within its own zone has resulted in a recharacterization of this project from a supplemental project for which it would bear 100% of the costs to a baseline project for which about 52% of costs are exported to other zones.”

DP&L is asking FERC to reject the project or defer consideration to allow PJM transmission owners time to revise the Tariff to prevent them from unilaterally revising local planning criteria to secure baseline status for their projects.

DP&L said Dominion is exploiting what it called a loophole resulting from an Order 1000-related filing by PJM TOs that permits a portion of the costs of new 500-kV baseline projects to be shared by load-serving entities throughout the RTO.