The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has approved a controversial plan to fast-track PJM grid connections for up to 50 new dispatchable gas-fired generators. PJM. the nation’s largest regional transmission organization, says it faces potential shortages as a result of new electricity demand as soon as next year. The order (ER25-712) allows the selected projects to jump the queue of projects lined up to get onto the grid that serves some 65 million people in 13 mid-Atlantic states.
In a notational vote (meaning it was not done in a public meeting) on Feb. 11, the commission adopted a plan PJM had proposed in December. In approving PJM’s plan to study line-jumping access to its high-voltage transmission grid, FERC said that “the proposal reasonably addresses the possibility of a resource adequacy shortfall driven by significant load growth, premature retirements, and delayed new entry” to the grid.
New FERC Republican Chairman Mark Christie, and Democratic former chairman Willie Phillips and Commissioner David Rosner voted to approve the PJM proposal. Christie has made improving dispatchable generation in PJM a priority throughout his FERC membership. In a statement, Phillips and Rosner said, “PJM is in grave danger of not having enough generation to meet demand. The Commission must confront the real and consequential harm that failing to act could have on consumers in the PJM region.”
Democratic Commissioner Judy Chang dissented. She wrote, “While PJM faces looming reliability challenges, its proposed solution primarily prioritizes the size of the new interconnecting resources over speed, and thus is poorly designed to address those very real challenges. By expediting projects that are unlikely to directly address PJM’s reliability risks in the 2026-2030 timeframe, PJM’s filing also presents a risk of the worst of both worlds: it compromises the Commission’s open access principles with no guarantee it will resolve PJM’s reliability issue.”
Commissioner Lindsay See did not participate in the case.
Most of the major interests in the PJM footprint approved the plan, including the electric utilities, state regulators, non-utility generators, and the PJM market monitor. Other interests, including renewable energy generators, environmentalists, and consumer groups, opposed the plan.
Representing solar and wind energy interests, the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) said the scoring method PJM will use to determine who jumps the line “assigns no weight to a project’s absence of fuel dependency and lower weights to location, expected completion, uprates and utilization of headroom. As a result, certain thermal projects may receive a higher score than other projects with lower individual capacity accreditations that may come on-line more quickly and be more available at critical times.”
The Natural Resources Defense Council said the PJM plan “constitutes an admission that PJM’s interconnection queue has failed.” In response to that failure, the venerable environmental group said the PJM plan “does little more than provide an opportunity for large projects of particular technologies to purchase an option to jump the queue.”
NRDC also focused on the PJM scorecard: “So, for example, all else equal, a nuclear plant with a proposed commercial operation date of 2040 will be chosen over a gas combined cycle plant that will be in service by 2030; a gas combined cycle that will not be in service until the mid-2030s will be chosen over an 8-hour battery that can go into service quickly, and so on.”
In the same order, FERC unanimously approved changes in PJM’s “Surplus Interconnection Service” or SIS. Utility Dive explained that SIS “allows a new resource to use any unused portion of an existing generating facility’s interconnection service as long as the total amount of interconnection service at the point of interconnection remains the same. Battery storage, for example, could be paired with intermittent resources to more fully use available interconnection capacity.”
FERC approved PJM’s plan to speed up the SIS procedure, which runs separately from PJM’s conventional interconnection queue and is much faster in providing grid connections. According to industry supporters, this reform could put more than 26 GW of capacity on the grid for the 2026/2027 delivery year.
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