Commissioner James Danly Dissent on Thunderhead Wind Energy LLC

Commissioner James Danly Statement
April 26, 2021
Docket No.  ER21-1023-000

I dissent to today’s order granting Thunderhead Wind Energy LLC’s (Thunderhead) requested waiver to permit Southwest Power Pool, Inc. (SPP) to evaluate an alternative point of interconnection (POI) to the POI in Thunderhead’s generator interconnection agreement (GIA).  Thunderhead’s request is not materially different from its initial request we rejected last November[1] and, in my view, it should be rejected for similar reasons.

That a change in POI represents a material modification can, in some instances, cause hardship.  Here, it appears that Thunderhead’s proposed change may not in fact have any effect on SPP’s evaluation of Thunderhead’s interconnection request.  Viewed in isolation, waiving the tariff provision here to allow SPP to determine whether there has actually been a material modification seems like a reasonable decision.

My concern, however, is that it is usually a mistake to assess waivers concerning interconnection requests in isolation.  Interconnection queues, especially in RTOs, are long.  They have significant backlogs.  The management of these queues requires hard and fast rules applied consistently, even when they cause hardship.  This is the case with respect to the tariff provision at issue here, which provides that changes in a POI are definitionally material modifications, absent exceptions not applicable here.  SPP and other utilities are hard-pressed as it is to process their interconnection requests in a timely manner.  To require the additional burden of determining whether a request to change a POI constitutes a material change only makes the task of evaluating interconnection requests more challenging.  And one can readily predict that once we grant this waiver, we will, in short order, be inundated with similar waiver requests.

For these reasons, I respectfully dissent.