Federal regulators have rejected a controversial plan to fast-track new gas-fired power plants onto the grid that spans 15 states from Louisiana to North Dakota, handing a victory to critics who feared it could derail the region’s clean energy buildout and worsen the reliability problems it was meant to address.
Friday’s 2–1 decision from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission found that the Expedited Resource Addition Study (ERAS) plan put forward by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator failed to meet the standards for a “just and reasonable” way to solve MISO’s forecast grid shortfall of 4.7 gigawatts by 2028.
MISO filed the ERAS proposal as an emergency measure meant to alleviate this problem — but only for fossil-gas power plants. The plan allowed utilities to receive interconnection agreements for “shovel-ready” gas power plants in less than 90 days. For the most part, the only projects eligible for this treatment would have been those built by vertically integrated utilities, a further point of criticism from energy experts who viewed the plan as circumventing the region’s competitive energy market.
Meanwhile, yearslong wait times would still be in store for the hundreds of gigawatts’ worth of projects in MISO’s existing queue, the majority of which are solar, wind, and battery installations.
But FERC’s decision found some key deficiencies in the ERAS plan. First, it “places no limit on the number of projects that could be entered in the ERAS process,” the commission’s opinion states, which “could result in an ERAS queue with processing times for interconnection requests that are too lengthy to meet MISO’s stated resource adequacy and reliability needs.” That could also cause the ERAS queue to become just as backed up as MISO’s existing queue for competitively proposed generation and energy storage projects.
These factors differentiated MISO’s ERAS plan from other fast-track interconnection proposals recently approved by FERC, such as one from grid operator PJM Interconnection that set a one-time window for up to 50 projects to apply for fast-track consideration, the decision notes. That process “reasonably balanced the need to address PJM’s resource adequacy challenges with the need to avoid an influx of projects that could overwhelm PJM’s interconnection process and lead to further delays.”
