Docket No. ER25-3167-000
At a time when this Commission should be taking every possible measure to make connecting new generation to the grid faster, more certain, and less costly, today’s order instead imposes unnecessary costs and introduces regulatory uncertainty. For those reasons, I respectfully dissent.
While I appreciate my colleagues’ concerns regarding the theoretical harm that could come to other interconnection customers, no evidence was submitted to the record in this proceeding supporting a finding that these harms will actually materialize. Dominion commits to hold all other interconnection customers harmless.[1] PJM also favors granting waiver, noting that it supports the “hold harmless” language that Dominion and PJM intend to include in the relevant Generator Interconnection Agreements, which ultimately must be accepted by the Commission.[2] And finally, no party protests this waiver request.
Given this record and the urgent need to add generation to PJM’s system as quickly as possible to address looming capacity shortages and surging demand, I cannot support holding Dominion’s waiver request to a higher standard than the Commission has held other similar waiver requests in the past.[3] Ultimately, the $40 million in costs imposed by this order will be directly borne by Dominion’s customers,[4] and customers around the country will bear the indirect cost of the regulatory uncertainty as they struggle to discern the evidentiary standard that the Commission will apply to future requests for similar waivers.
For these reasons, I respectfully dissent.
[1] Waiver Request at 16-17.
[2] PJM Comments at 7.
[3] See, e.g., San Diego Gas & Elec. Co., 191 FERC ⁋ 61,064, at PP 10-11 (2025) (granting San Diego Gas & Electric Company’s request for waiver of the requirement to post security to itself as the transmission owner, because doing so would “[serve] no useful purpose” and “have no practical effect.”). The majority attempts to distinguish this precedent based on certain features of the CAISO tariff, but those features were not relevant to the Commission’s decision to grant the requested waiver.
[4] Waiver Request at 11 (“Requiring [Dominion] to post Security for its own benefit is a significant and unreasonable burden to its customers, which [Dominion] estimates would cost up to $40 million per year in credit fees paid to its lending banks.”).