Dive Brief:
- The Midcontinent Independent System Operator and the Southwest Power Pool are asking federal regulators to approve changes to their tariffs and joint operating agreement needed to advance $1.7 billion in transmission projects that could enable up to 30 GW of new generation along the grid operators’ northern seam.
- The five transmission projects — selected in the grid operators’ “unprecedented” Joint Targeted Interconnection Queue process — will be paid for by generation interconnection customers and supported by $464.5 million in potential Department of Energy funding.
- “JTIQ provides a framework for addressing the challenges posed by massive amounts of interconnection requests submitted to the [regional transmission organizations,] the lack of current system capacity to accommodate that volume of interconnection, and the significant incremental cost of constructing upgrades that serve only to promote the interconnection of individual clusters of interconnection requests,” SPP said in a filing at FERC on Wednesday.
Dive Insight:
The JTIQ initiative grew out of a problem plaguing grid operators around the country: interconnection queues that are clogged with hundreds of requests from companies seeking to connect new generation sources to the grid.
After a multiyear stakeholder process, on Aug. 16 MISO and SPP filed similar requests at FERC to amend their JOA. MISO hasn’t yet submitted proposed changes to its tariff.
SPP said the filings should be reviewed as a package and that its tariff changes should be allowed to take effect on Nov. 14, the same day the grid operators want the JOA amendments to take effect. Any future JTIQ projects would require additional tariff change approvals from FERC.
SPP said the DOE Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships funding may be finalized next month, but the award will be contingent on FERC approving the proposed changes to the grid operators’ tariffs and JOA.
MISO staff intend to ask its board to approve the JTIQ projects in early December, according to the grid operator’s mid-June presentation on the initiative. MISO has about 350 GW in its interconnection queue and SPP has about 84 GW in its queue. More than 90% of the capacity seeking to interconnect to the grid is solar, storage and wind, according to the presentation.
“Through JTIQ, the RTOs have worked together, in conjunction with their respective state commissions and other stakeholders, to streamline the interconnection process by linking it to a forward-looking study that evaluates long-term system needs across study clusters to capture efficiencies not obtainable through a piecemeal process,” SPP said in its tariff filing.
The JTIQ framework provides generators with increased interconnection cost certainty, reduces the scope of studies on how grid interconnections will affect neighboring systems and improves timing certainty for interconnections, SPP said.
The framework also identifies optimized network upgrades that address larger and longer-term system needs across the MISO-SPP seams and across study clusters, compared to individual MISO and SPP affected system study processes, SPP said.
SPP’s proposed tariff revisions aim to facilitate the allocation, assessment, recovery and distribution of capital and non-capital costs associated with the JTIQ projects in its footprint, address how benefiting generation interconnection customers will bear costs for the JTIQ upgrades and incorporate the JTIQ projects into the grid operator’s planning processes, among other things, SPP said.
