The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is pushing back against a recent gas pipeline ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals from the D.C. Circuit. The court in July vacated FERC’s approval of a Transco project to move gas from the Marcellus shale region of Pennsylvania to New Jersey, ruling that the agency’s 2023 approval was “arbitrary and capricious” in failing to adequately consider the greenhouse gas implications of the order and in cavalierly ignoring the state’s claims that it did not need the additional gas supply.
In FERC’s monthly meeting Thursday (Sept. 19), FERC Chairman Willie Phillips said “the court erred in vacating our authorization. The court didn’t truly consider how disruptive” its order would be by denying customers natural gas needed for heating this coming winter. Transco, he noted, had already begun work on the 36-mile pipeline extension when the appeals court slammed the door on the project.
Briefing reporters after the meeting, Phillips brushed aside questions about whether and when FERC might appeal the D.C. Circuit ruling in the New Jersey case. The commission is also facing a series of apparently contradictory pipeline rulings that overshadow the commission’s policies on pipeline reviews. He said the timing of appeals is still undecided.
For the New Jersey case, Phillips said the commission has “already started work. We are committed to following law and precedent” and he is looking for a bipartisan approach to the issues the commission faces. He said he anticipates FERC will wrap up the environmental aspects of the remand sometime next summer, a key element in the court’s rejection of FERC, and “at that time the commission will determine how we will respond.”
In other action Thursday, in two separate orders FERC proposed new and modified rules to, in the commission’s words, “address the growing risks posed by malicious actors seeking to compromise the reliable operation of the bulk power system.” FERC’s proposal would direct the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) to “identify current supply chain risks to their grid-related cybersecurity systems” and validate what they are told by vendors about the risks. The proposal would also have NERC extend their supply chain security standards to “products known as protected cyber assets.”
FERC also wants NERC to extend their internal standards to “outside of the electronic security perimeter to electronic access control or monitoring systems and physical access control systems.” NERC should submit those actions to FERC ‘within 12 months” of a final rule.
Responding to the D.C.-based Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy, FERC on Thursday said it will convene a “consultation” with federally-recognized tribes “on whether to conduct a rulemaking to revise” the commission’s pro forma Large Generation Interconnection Procedures. Those procedures require tribal interests to post “commercial readiness deposits” and may face “potential withdrawal penalties.”
The tribal consultations will take place in two web-based meetings on October 28 and November 4, from 2pm to 4pm ET.
The current agenda lists discussion items:
- Whether to adopt a definition of “Tribal Energy Development Organizations.”
- Whether those organizations can defer paying the deposits until an interconnection agreement is in place.
- Whether to exempt tribal organizations from paying current withdrawal penalties.
- Whether to limit organizations that withdraw from interconnection requests to “the actual study costs incurred by the withdrawing customer” capped at $150,000.
- What challenges tribes ‘face when pursuing generator interconnection, including the impacts of the deposits and penalties.
- “Whether energy projects developed by tribes are more likely to proceed to commercial operation than projects proposed by other developers? And if so, please share why.”
–Kennedy Maize