FERC has authorized an exception to MISO’s interconnection rights transfer process, allowing two Xcel Energy subsidiaries to cooperate on a replacement of a coal-fired plant with a solar farm.
FERC said Xcel’s Northern States Wisconsin is free to substitute about 650 MW of new solar and potential storage facilities for Northern States Minnesota’s 591-MW Allen S. King Power Plant, which is scheduled to be powered down in 2028. The project would use the King plant’s point of interconnection (ER24-1719).
Xcel requested the waiver of MISO’s ordinary interconnection rules because it plans to hand over MISO interconnection permissions from one Northern States Power affiliate to another. The King plant is near the Minnesota-Wisconsin state line.
Ordinarily, MISO’s generating facility replacement rules prevent owners of retiring generator from transferring their facilities and interconnection rights to someone else from a year before they submit a replacement request up until the replacement generation reached commercial operation.
Xcel plans to be coal-free no later than 2034 and said this transfer is a piece of the puzzle. It said pursuing an expedited process using a different interconnection customer under MISO’s generator replacement process is preferable to submitting the project for study in the interconnection queue, which takes years to complete.
Xcel said it investigated alternatives to Northern States Wisconsin developing the solar facilities, including having Northern States Minnesota lead the project. However, it said Northern States Minnesota would be considered an out-of-state developer on the project, which requires approval from the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin.
FERC said its approval was based in part on the fact that Xcel first explored alternatives and concluded they would “present tariff obstacles or other significant complexities and challenges.”
The commission said the transfer doesn’t introduce queue-jumping concerns because the waiver encompasses “two wholly owned subsidiaries that operate a single integrated system” and doesn’t involve “unaffiliated entities outside of the interconnection queue.”
The waiver, however, elicited a caution from Commissioner Allison Clements, who said the order exemplifies the “increasingly strained reasoning underpinning the transferability restrictions in MISO’s (and other transmission providers’) generator replacement rules.” She called for a “fulsome evaluation” of generator replacement rules because of their “piecemeal proliferation” across the country.
“I concur because the effect of granting this waiver is that a brownfield site of existing generation on the transmission system can be expeditiously reused. I believe that outcome is consistent with the purpose of MISO’s generator replacement rules, and I acknowledge that fast-tracking the interconnection of new generation at previously studied sites may yield efficiencies and cost savings,” Clements nevertheless wrote in a concurrence to the order.
But Clements suggested MISO’s transfer restrictions today may show undue preference to owners of existing generation. She said at this point, it appears MISO’s transfer rules require only the party assuming interconnection rights to be an affiliate of the original owner to bypass the queue and the cost responsibility of the original network upgrades.
MISO’s generator replacement requests are poised to increase as members turn off the lights at their aging, baseload plants.
Clements ended by urging the commission to take a fresh look at generator replacement processes and their “nonsensical transferability restrictions” that FERC “must contort around to permit rational commercial arrangements.”
