FERC rejected a North Carolina environmental group’s request to reconsider its decision not to investigate the group’s market manipulation allegations against Duke Energy (EL15-32).
The North Carolina Waste Awareness and Reduction Network (NC WARN) had complained that Duke was building excess power plants instead of purchasing power from neighboring utilities, resulting in unjust rates. It asked that the commission fund a study evaluating the benefits of Duke joining an RTO. In its request for rehearing, the group asserted the study would show that the creation of a southeastern RTO would result in savings for customers.
FERC denied NC WARN’s request for lacking certain filing requirements, including a “statement of issues.”
“This requirement is not a mere formality,” the commission said. “Rather, the purpose of this requirement is to ensure that the filer, the commission and all other participants understand the issues raised by the filer, and to enable the commission to respond to these issues and avoid wasteful litigation.”
ERCOT, MISO and SPP all set new generation records for wind in the last two weeks.
SPP has seen the most increased activity, setting six new generation peaks this season. The latest came Nov. 15, when SPP eclipsed 9,000 MW of generation for the first time with 9,013 MW. The RTO generated a record 38.3% of its electricity from wind energy Nov. 4.
MISO set its latest record peak with 12,613.9 MW on Nov. 19, breaking the previous mark of 12,006 set Oct. 28. Todd Ramey, the RTO’s vice president of system operations and market services, told an informational forum last week that wind generated 4.1 TWh in October, up from 2.9 TWh in September and 3.6 TWh in October 2014.
ERCOT reported a new high of 12,641 MW of wind at 9:36 p.m. Nov. 16 — representing more than 75% of its installed wind capacity — and accounting for almost one-third of its electricity production.
ERCOT’s previous high came Oct. 22, when it generated 12,238 MW, meeting 36.8% of its load at the time.
The RTOs are home to many of the top wind-producing states, with the Dakotas, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas all generating between 6.9% (Nebraska) and 28.5% (Iowa) of their energy from wind in 2014, according to the American Wind Energy Association.
NextEra Energy has offered to buy Energy Future Holdings’ Oncor transmissions business, which is slated to be sold to an investment group led by Hunt Consolidated. NextEra made the offer in a filing with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware, which is reviewing EFH’s Chapter 11 exit plan.
The sale of Oncor is at the heart of EFH’s $42 billion reorganization strategy, but the company has chosen the Hunt-led group as the buyer.
“NextEra’s alternative transaction is the only proposal that can provide several significant benefits to Oncor, its customers, its creditors and EFH,” NextEra wrote in its bankruptcy court filing.
Duke Completes Storage System on Site of Retired Coal Plant
Duke Energy, working with two other companies, has installed a 2-MW battery storage system on the grounds of its retired W.C Beckjord coal-fired plant near New Richmond, Ohio. Duke said the Beckjord site allowed the company to take advantage of existing transmission infrastructure that connected the battery system to the grid.
The battery storage system will be used in grid frequency regulation — to either release energy onto the grid instantaneously or absorb excess energy — without the grid operator having to dispatch a generator. The battery system is faster and cheaper than a power plant, which could take 10 minutes or more to ramp up.
Duke worked with LG Chem, which provided the lithium-ion batteries, and Greensmith, which provided the software necessary for the frequency synchronicity. It is Duke’s third battery storage system.
Susquehanna Unit 1 Back Online After Nov. 12 SCRAM
Talen Energy’s Susquehanna Unit 1 in Pennsylvania came back online Thursday night after being off for a week following an unscheduled automatic shutdown.
Talen reported that during routine testing of equipment on Nov. 12, one of eight large valves controlling steam from the reactor to the generator closed. The unit automatically shut itself down.
The company said it conducted other maintenance tasks while the unit was down. “We made the choice, while the unit was out of service during a period of mild fall weather and lower wholesale power prices, to advance some maintenance tasks we had planned for the refueling outage next spring,” said Jon Franke, Susquehanna site vice president.
Retired Talen Coal Plant Site Has Potential Buyers
Talen Energy is in talks with potential buyers of a site in Billings, Mont., where the defunct J.E. Corette coal-fired power plant is being dismantled.
The 153-MW plant, which operated for 47 years, was closed in April because it didn’t meet mercury pollution standards.
Talen, which acquired the site during its spinoff this year from PPL, did not identify the prospective buyers.
NRG Names Frotte Treasurer as Stock Continues to Plummet
Frotte
NRG Energy announced a small management shakeup Nov. 19 as its stock value closed below $12/share for the first time in 11 years.
NRG named Gaetan Frotte as senior vice president and treasurer. Frotte, who served as the senior vice president of finance and strategy of NRG Yield, replaces G. Gary Garcia, who left the treasurer position for undisclosed reasons at the end of June. Chad Plotkin, vice president of investor relations, will fill in for Frotte at NRG Yield.
The company is in the midst of cutting costs and shifting away from its renewable-power businesses. Although NRG turned a small profit in the third quarter, the company is struggling with declining revenues from its coal-fired power plants, while its solar business is draining money and still finding its footing.
PSE&G Gets OK to Replace 510 Miles of Gas Mains with Plastic
Public Service Electric and Gas has received regulatory approval for a $905 million plan to replace more than 500 miles of cast iron and steel gas mains with plastic mains over the next three years.
PSE&G said it wants to pursue the project while the price of natural gas remains low.
The work, set to begin after the ground thaws early next year, is expected to raise gas rates by about 1.5% annually for four years.
Eversource Customers in Mass. to See Cut in Electric Rates
The Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities approved a 28% rate decrease for some Eversource Energy customers. The residential rate on Jan. 1 will be set at 10.804 cents/kWh, compared to last winter’s price of 15.046 cents/kWh.
The typical monthly residential bill in the Greater Boston and MetroWest areas will be about $101, compared to $122 last winter. Average residential bills in the South Shore, Greater New Bedford and Cape Cod regions will fall from $124 to about $103.
Equinix Partners with NextEra, Invenergy to Power Data Centers
Equinix, a provider of interconnection and data center services, has signed power purchase agreements with affiliates of NextEra Energy Resources and Invenergy for wind energy in Oklahoma and Texas.
Equinix said the agreements will provide a combined 225 MW of capacity, fully powering all of the company’s data centers in North America by the end of 2016, and nearly doubling its worldwide purchases of renewable energy.
A NextEra affiliate will supply 125 MW of wind capacity that is expected to produce 556 GWh a year from the Rush Springs Renewable Generation Facility in Oklahoma.
Iberdrola USA plans to change its name to Avangrid following its merger with UIL Holdings, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The subsidiary of Spanish energy giant Iberdrola indicated when it announced the merger with UIL that it would take on a new name. UIL owns United Illuminating in Connecticut and three New England gas distribution companies. Iberdrola USA, which has a large wind energy business, also owns Central Maine Power, Maine Natural Gas, New York State Electric and Gas and Rochester Gas and Electric.
Michael West, a spokesman for UIL, said the new name involves only the U.S. holding company. The utilities will continue to operate under their familiar names.
General Electric has officially moved its renewable energy headquarters from New York state to Paris following its $10 billion acquisition of the energy business of French conglomerate Alstom SA.
The move was a concession to the French government, and Alstom’s offshore wind business was regarded as the stronger business unit. The new renewable energy business will focus increasingly on offshore wind. GE’s onshore wind unit will remain in Schenectady.
FERC last week ordered RTOs and ISOs to file reports detailing their current practices and planned changes on five price formation issues, saying it needed more information before taking substantive action.
In September, the commission issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would require RTOs and ISOs to align their settlement and dispatch intervals, saying it was the first of a number of proposals on which the commission plans to act. (See NOPR Requires RTOs Switch to 5-Minute Settlements.)
FERC said last week that the RTO/ISO reports, due in 75 days, will help it identify best practices and inform its future actions. It asked for information on:
pricing of fast-start resources;
commitments to manage multiple contingencies;
look-ahead modeling;
uplift allocation; and
transparency.
“Identifying best practices for these five areas should provide incentives to maintain reliability, to facilitate accurate and transparent pricing, to reduce uplift, and for market participants to operate consistent with dispatch signals,” the commission wrote. “We have selected these areas because the discussion at the price formation workshops and the comments received after the workshops suggest that a number of RTOs and ISOs have sufficient experience with these areas such that we may be able to discern best practices and understand unintended consequences.
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“The commission seeks this information not only to answer technical questions regarding how each RTO/ISO addresses these topics, but also to understand the reasons why each RTO/ISO has made its set of policy choices,” it added.
Commissioner Cheryl LaFleur said the issue is one of the commission’s most important initiatives, particularly because of the shift from coal to lower carbon resources. “I know there’s been a lot of anticipation and even impatience for action in this area,” she said. “This is the second in a series of orders; I don’t believe it will be the last.”
Commissioner Tony Clark said the energy markets “are our best performing and most mature markets.”
“So it seems to me that this is an appropriate manner in which to deal with this … so that we take it one bite at a time and we don’t have secondary unintended effects [that might occur] if we were to act all at once.”
Commissioner Colette Honorable noted that some have complained that work on price formation issues has “stalled” in RTO stakeholder processes.
“While we are working, I want to gently ask that [stakeholders] continue working, too, and that if you identify market flaws and other issues that need to be addressed, please continue to demonstrate your leadership.”
FERC last week accepted a compliance filing by NYISO regarding its revised compensation methodology governing the provision of frequency regulation service under Order 755. “We believe that NYISO has demonstrated that its interim market power mitigation measures have successfully limited opportunities for firms to benefit from bidding regulation movement above marginal costs, and therefore meet the requirements of Order No. 755,” FERC wrote (ER12-1653).
Tennessee Gas Pipeline on Friday filed an application with FERC for a certificate of public convenience and necessity for the Northeast Energy Direct pipeline (CP16-21).
Tennessee Gas, a unit of Kinder Morgan, is seeking FERC approval in the fourth quarter of 2016, with construction starting in January 2017 and an in-service date of Nov. 1, 2018. The company estimates the project will cost $5.2 billion.
“Adding the NED project capacity to transport incremental natural gas supplies will ease natural gas capacity constraints and is expected to provide significant benefits to energy consumers in the region in the form of lower natural gas and electricity prices,” the application says.
The project consists of two components that will transport natural gas from the Marcellus shale gas region of Pennsylvania to New England.
The supply path component is a 174-mile segment from Bradford County in northern Pennsylvania to an existing compressor in Wright, N.Y. The segment can transport 1.23 million dekatherms per day, of which Tennessee Gas says it has long-term contracts for 552,262 dekatherms per day.
The market path component continues from Wright for 188 miles through New York and Massachusetts, turning slightly north into New Hampshire and then moving south to its end in Dracut, Mass. This route has a capacity of 1.3 million dekatherms per day, with contracts for 751,650 dekatherms per day.
The staff of the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission has released a report that said Northeast Energy Direct is its preferred project of several proposed natural gas pipelines to ease supply constraints. (See NH PUC Staff: Northeast Energy Direct Pipeline Would Lower Power Prices.)
SPP has responded to stakeholder feedback by making several tweaks to its redesigned website.
Many of the improvements were to the site’s search function, which now returns results sorted with the most recently posted documents first and includes the ability to filter results by file type.
After logging in to their profiles on the site, users are now returned to the page they were previously viewing, rather than being taken to their profile page. Changes have also been made to simplify registration for meetings and other events.
Calendar (ICS) files sent to users after meeting registrations now include hotel information and have been reformatted to display all information in a more readable manner.
The RTO said its website project team is already at work on another set of improvements, to come in the next several weeks.
ECC, Gas-Day Testing to Begin with ‘Big Bang’
SPP staff told stakeholders last week to expect a “big bang” testing approach — an apparent reference to the complexity and breadth of the systems involved — next summer and fall as it continues to develop the markets system’s enhanced combined-cycle (ECC) software. (See “Enhanced Combined-Cycle Project Moves Forward” in SPP Board of Directors/Members Committee Briefs.)
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The ECC project, intended to provide more sophisticated modeling that captures combined-cycle plants’ flexibility, is being conducted in conjunction with improving gas market-clearing logic. SPP anticipates market participants will be able to begin gas-day testing in August and ECC testing in December.
The testing will involve more than a dozen systems or interfaces, four different vendors and seven SPP departments. At least two other system revisions will be released in addition to the ECC/gas-day releases.
Staff told SPP’s Change Working Group — which is responsible for implementing changes affecting markets and members — said it would deliver quarterly releases of the markets systems through 2016, making incremental improvements to the ECC functionality. One project manager said the team will have to see how downstream systems are affected as it gathers upstream system requirements.
Adding to the project’s complexity is the market-clearing engine, or, as SPP’s Jim Gonzalez said, “The actual calculator.” The ECC logic is so complex, Gonzalez said, the clearing engine has to run 20 times to produce a good solution.
MISO’s Steering Committee put its own operations under inspection during a Nov. 19 meeting, when it addressed stakeholder concerns that meeting materials are being posted too late.
Michelle Bloodworth, MISO’s executive director of external and stakeholder affairs, said meeting and agenda materials should be posted at least a week before the meeting under governance guidelines.
“We have not forgotten this and we’re taking a lot of strides internally,” Bloodworth said, adding that MISO is looking at different options on how to notify stakeholders when materials are posted.
MISO management will address the committee’s concerns on posting and discuss verbal updates versus updates accompanied by posted materials at an informational forum Dec. 15.
The Steering Committee went over a tentative schedule of monthly 2016 meetings. In light of the impending stakeholder redesign, the committee is embracing a “business as usual” policy through March until a more defined plan emerges from the stakeholder redesign committee. (See MISO Board Reduces Meeting Schedule; AC Likely to Follow.)
Also during the meeting, the closed Operations Working Group and the closed Operations Planning Working Group were merged by vote into the temporarily named Confidential Reliability Working Group. The Steering Committee also gave the go-ahead on a draft charter and management plan for the newly merged entity. The group’s purpose is to “provide a forum to promote the reliability of the Bulk Electric System and to develop, review and recommend operational planning practices,” according to the draft management plan.
Kent Feliks, chair of the Market Subcommittee, asked the Steering Committee for ideas on how the subcommittee should address projects that are withdrawn from MISO’s market roadmaps. Currently, there’s no procedure in place for projects that drop out of the 2017-2019 Market Roadmap. Feliks said a possible procedure and improvements to MISO Market Roadmap process will be discussed at the Dec. 1 Market Subcommittee meeting.
MISO Tops Wind Record, Reports Low October Energy Prices
Todd Ramey, vice president of system operations and market services, told an informational forum last week that the RTO set a new wind generation record Oct. 28, with instantaneous output of 12.4 GW, breaking the previous record of 11.9 GW, set Jan. 8. Wind produced 4.1 TWh for the month, up from 2.9 TWh in September and 3.6 TWh in October 2014.
Meanwhile, at a MISO informational forum held Nov. 18, the RTO reported relatively low wholesale energy prices for the month of October, owing to inexpensive fuel prices, strong wind farm output and slightly higher temperatures above historic October averages.
According to a MISO presentation, load peaked at 84.6 GW on Oct. 8, significantly less than September’s peak of 113.9 GW. Average load for the month was 68.6 GW, down 2.4% from October 2014.
LMPs averaged $25.34/MWh in October, down from $26.80/MWh in September and $32.44/MWh in October 2014.
MISO Launches ‘Jargon-Free’ Blog
MISO last week introduced a blog, MISO Matters, an effort to increase understanding of RTO operations by simplifying technical topics. The first entry features breakdowns of peak load, automatic reserve sharing and the MISO Transmission Expansion Plan.
“We will feature what MISO is doing around big topics, like [the Clean Power Plan] and transmission planning, but also try and explain some of the day-to-day business operations,” MISO spokesman Andy Schonert said. “Most of all, the goal of the blog is to tell MISO’s story free of jargon and acronyms, and explain what MISO does on a daily basis.”
FERC on Friday accepted SPP’s request to waive Tariff provisions governing the selection of an industry expert panel, allowing it to use one of its 2016 panelists to complete the 2015 panel evaluating proposals for the RTO’s first competitive solicitation under Order 1000 (ER16-126).
SPP filed the waiver request with FERC on Oct. 20, saying that the only candidate in its 2015 pool with expertise in one of five subject areas required wouldn’t be able to serve. (See SPP Seeks Waiver on Panel; Sets New Wind Records.)
FERC found “good cause” to grant SPP’s requested waiver, saying it “will remedy a concrete problem and allow for regulatory certainty regarding review of the proposals submitted for the project.”
FERC noted the waiver requested was of limited scope, covering just two subsections of SPP’s Tariff and it addressed a one-time event. The commission said the request “will create no undesirable consequences since the candidate’s qualifications will be reviewed and approved by both the Oversight Committee and the SPP Board of Directors prior to serving on the IEP.”
MISO’s Planning Advisory Committee continued discussion Wednesday on a revised planning futures process that will help the RTO develop transmission needed to comply with the Clean Power Plan.
Durgesh Manjure, MISO’s manager of resource adequacy coordination, said the final CPP plan will be incorporated into the MISO Transmission Expansion Plan beginning with the 2017 cycle. The MTEP 16 futures are based on the draft rule, which was changed significantly.
“Futures for the next few MTEP cycles are expected be driven largely by the CPP. Work done for MTEP 17 should allow for more efficient development of MTEP 18-plus futures,” MISO wrote in a presentation.
MISO “believe[s] it’s appropriate to bring in the Clean Power Plan to the MTEP 17 cycle,” even though implementation itself isn’t slated to begin until 2022, Manjure said. States are required to submit a compliance plan or an extension request in September 2016 with final plans due in September 2018.
While MISO said incorporating the CPP final rule into MTEP16 “could be beneficial,” there are ultimately no plans to revise MTEP16 futures to reflect the final rule.
Stakeholders have said that drivers used for MTEP futures should not be limited by existing policies and include policies on the horizon. They also asked that MISO share historical and forecast data on key variables before workshops take place.
Transmission-owning stakeholders requested that MISO review its resource siting process. The RTO said siting is to be reviewed in the coming year.
“It’s a journey of discovery,” Manjure said, quoting MISO executive vice president of transmission and technology Clair Moeller’s stance on CPP preparation. “By no means are we jumping the gun on MTEP 17. This is a precursor to the conversation,” he added.
Under the realigned MTEP futures development, MISO will share relevant historical and forecast data at the beginning of an MTEP cycle, then check if the existing futures sufficiently capture the economic and policy landscape for long-term transmission planning, reusing them if appropriate. The RTO will also actively look for any new sensitivity scenarios and plan to reuse resource expansion and siting in successive PROMOD models. PROMOD models themselves will be updated annually to represent the latest topology in MISO’s footprint.
“The timeline and overall process definitely warrants a look,” Manjure summed up.
Manjure said the revised planning futures process will be subject to “ongoing discussions” at upcoming PAC meetings; no voting date has been set.
Proposed Changes to Expedited Project Review Fall Short, Stakeholders Say
The PAC continued its review of MISO’s proposed changes to the out-of-cycle review process, with some stakeholders complaining that the changes don’t address their concerns that expedited projects could undercut competition under FERC Order 1000.
The RTO is drafting changes to its business practices in response to the uproar earlier this year over Entergy’s $200 million out-of-cycle project in Louisiana.
MISO defended its proposal to eliminate detailed criteria defining expedited projects, saying it did so because the RTO does not have the authority to challenge load-serving entities’ load assumptions or regulatory drivers. MISO said it would consider adding more detailed criteria “provided that those bounds do not require MISO to challenge the obligations of the LSE or [transmission owner].”
“We really believe that the best mechanism to address these types of issues is transparency,” said Matthew Tackett, a MISO principal advisor.
MISO also said the PAC does not have the authority to order planning staff to report to MISO’s Board of Directors on expedited projects. MISO staff reports to the board at its own discretion.
“Of course we will consider [recommending] these projects if there’s an appropriate need and if the timing is appropriate,” Tackett said.
Stakeholders argued that under the proposed changes, MISO and the PAC can do little to prevent TOs and LSEs from inflating their load demands and proposing an expedited project under false pretenses. One PAC member said it would be “troubling” if MISO chooses to interpret the Tariff language narrowly and ignore stakeholder concerns.
Another said the revision process had become “a very frustrating exercise” because redline suggestions to the manual language have not been accepted by MISO.
Discussion on the process will wrap up at December’s PAC meeting, when the committee will be asked to approve the changes.
Queue Remodel Moves to Final PAC Review; Stakeholders Request Transition Plan
MISO expects to draft final Tariff language for its interconnection queue reform effort in the coming month.
The proposed changes, which include the introduction of phases and related fees along with a reduction of restudies, drew criticism from stakeholders at last week’s PAC meeting. Stakeholders representing wind power developers were particularly critical of the plan, saying it could increase their costs to $25,000/MW for projects that may not come to fruition.
The last revision of queue rules was completed in 2012.
“We have made changes over the past, but they’re not going as well as we envisioned, so this is our chance to go back and fix it,” Vikram Godbole, senior manager of MISO’s generator interconnection planning group, told the committee.
Under current rules, Godbole said, customers may leave their interconnection projects in the existing queue even if they don’t wish to proceed. He also said the current queue process takes too much time and doesn’t lend enough certainty to interconnection customers due to the volume of restudies.
“What we’re going to do is restructure the restudies and minimize the number of restudies allowed,” he said.
The new rules would eliminate restudies after interconnection customers execute a permanent generator interconnection agreement.
The new rules set new deadlines for receiving refunds of milestone payments.
Godbole said interconnection customers proposing a project will receive a detailed study from MISO in the first 110 days of the process. After reviewing the study, the requesting owner can decide whether to seek a refund of the $5,000/MW milestone paid at the queue application. Before executing a generator interconnection agreement, customers must pay two more milestones during phases that last 80 and 135 days, respectively.
No refunds will be permitted for interconnection customers that do not withdraw their projects before the third, 135-day phase begins.
Godbole encouraged stakeholders to view the proposed milestone payments as “deposits.”
Several stakeholders asked for more time to consider the changes, saying at just four months the process felt “rushed.” Godbole responded that MISO has incorporated three cycles of comments thus far on the proposed changes.
Some stakeholders requested a clearer transition to the new rules.
“We’ve heard it crystal clear that stakeholders want a transition plan by the time we file with FERC,” Godbole said. He asked stakeholders to provide “actionable items” that MISO can incorporate into the plan.
MISO asked for PAC’s feedback on the changes by Nov. 25 in order to present final Tariff language to the committee on Dec. 16.
