FERC on Wednesday settled a dispute between NextEra Energy (NYSE:NEE) and Avangrid (NYSE:AGR) over whether the former should be responsible for upgrading a circuit breaker at the Seabrook nuclear plant in New Hampshire (EL21-3, EL21-6).
The two have been going back and forth on the project, which ISO-NE says is necessary to help support Avangrid’s New England Clean Energy Connect transmission line, since 2020.
NextEra, which owns and operates Seabrook, initially asked FERC to find that the plant should not have to take a financial loss in order to upgrade the breaker. Avangrid then filed a complaint arguing that Seabrook has been “unlawfully attempting to delay and unreasonably increase the costs of the breaker replacement.”
FERC essentially found that Avangrid’s reasoning for why Seabrook should replace the breaker was faulty, but that the nuclear plant can’t refuse to replace it because the breaker is a component of the generating facility and upgrading it is required by “Good Utility Practice.”
The nuclear plant’s interconnection agreement “does not permit Seabrook to refuse to replace the breaker when replacement is needed for reliable operation of the Seabrook Station and given the concerns in the record related to the impact of any unreliable Station operation on the reliable operation of the system,” FERC wrote.
And the principles of Good Utility Practice require Seabrook to replace the breaker before NECEC interconnects because the breaker will be “overdutied” once it does, the commission said.
An ISO-NE system impact study found that the breaker is operating at 99.6% of its capability now, but it would be at 101.2% once NECEC is in service.
While FERC has been considering the complaint, the two parties have been hashing out an agreement: The filing says that the breaker replacement is now scheduled for a fall 2024 refueling outage, with the commercial operation date for NECEC being December 2024.
According to FERC, both agree that Avangrid should pay for the direct costs of the breaker placement, but they disagree over whether the company should pay opportunity and legal costs.
FERC sided with Avangrid, saying that Seabrook can’t recover those additional costs.
“The commission typically allows opportunity cost recovery so that the resource will be revenue-neutral and therefore indifferent towards the system operator’s decision as to which service the resource will provide,” FERC wrote. “That is not the case here.”