The Sierra Club and four other public interest organizations say that jumping the interconnection queue offers no guarantee of these resources coming online in time to meet what PJM describes as an urgent need.
The Sierra Club, Appalachian Voices and other organizations represented by Earthjustice filed a request for a rehearing regarding Federal Energy Regulatory Committee (FERC) approval of PJM’s Resource Reliability Initiative (RRI).
PJM Interconnection LLC is a regional transmission organization (RTO) based in Pennsylvania that serves 65 million people and has 185 GW of generating capacity.
According to The Sierra Club, the RRI would allow large gas-fired power plants to jump the interconnection queue, bypassing renewable energy projects that have been waiting in the queue for over six years.
“PJM’s RRI is a flawed, unfair proposal that clearly favors dirty, toxic gas plants, when there are plenty of renewable energy projects that have been in the queue for over half a decade that can get online faster, and at a cheaper cost than that of gas plants,” said Sierra Club Staff Attorney Megan Wachspress.
Sierra Club and Appalachian Voices are joined in the request by Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sustainable FERC Project. These public interest organizations (PIOs) state in the request that the RRI “stands to make PJM’s interconnection problems worse by passing new, unexpectedly high costs to resources that have already been waiting years for interconnection studies.”
Last year, PJM proposed to fast-track certain projects in its interconnection queue to address reliability concerns as data centers reportedly drove up demand across PJM’s thirteen-state region. The Sierra Club states that the proposal only prioritizes the size of the project over the speed at which it can get online. The request notes that the RRI “offers no guarantee of these resources coming online in time to meet what PJM describes as an urgent need.”
A recent report by the consultancy Grid Strategies prepared for Advanced Energy United found that PJM’s very slow pace of interconnecting new generating capacity in recent years will cost consumers as much as $7 billion in the coming year, due to higher prices in PJM’s latest capacity auction.
When PJM’s proposal was approved in February, Commissioner Chang dissented, stating that the plan was “poorly designed” to address what the RTO claims is the need for the proposal. The Sierra Club noted that two other commissioners issued warnings in their concurrence that the proposal is a “one-time emergency measure”.
“As it stands, the Commission’s decision lets PJM pick and choose which plants can skip the line without proper guardrails to ensure that these resources don’t pass their upgrade costs to other resources, or even that they come online in time,” said Earthjustice Senior Associate Attorney Ada Statler. “PJM’s proposed criteria unjustifiably preference large, polluting fossil fuel resources. But the Commission still has the opportunity to ensure that the Reliability Resource Initiative does not create a fast track for fossil fuels at the expense of clean energy resources that have been waiting to be processed by PJM for years.”
Read the rehearing request here.
