In June 2022, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking outlining a plan to speed up and streamline what’s become a slow and expensive process of connecting new solar, wind and battery projects to U.S. transmission grids. The proposed rules would require transmission grid operators, transmission-owning utilities and energy project developers alike to take on new responsibilities, with the potential for financial penalties if they fail to do so.
The NOPR solicits comments on the following rule changes:
- Implementing a first-ready, first-served cluster study process, which would allow larger interconnection studies encompassing numerous proposed generating facilities, rather than separate studies for each individual generating facility.
- Imposing firm deadlines and establishing penalties if transmission providers fail to complete interconnection studies on time, as well as reforms to administratively simplify the process of studying interconnection requests that are all related to the same state-authorized or mandated resource solicitation.
- Allowing more than one resource to co-locate on a shared site behind a single point of interconnection and share a single interconnection request and allowing interconnection customers to add a generating facility to an existing interconnection request under certain circumstances without automatically losing their position in the queue. In addition, the NOPR proposes to require transmission providers to consider alternative transmission solutions if requested by the interconnection customer.
- Certain modeling and performance requirements for non-synchronous generating facilities to address the unique characteristics of the changing resource mix.
With the June 16, 2022 release of this NOPR, comments will be due in 100 days.