Docket No. ER26-1020-000
Today’s order denies the request of Murphy Solar, LLC and Bells Solar, LLC to waive PJM Tariff section 301(A)(3)(b)(iii). We concur because the request falls far short of meeting the Commission’s criteria for granting waiver. We write separately to underscore a central point: waivers are a limited regulatory tool intended to protect the public interest, not a pressure valve to alleviate discomfort with the commercial consequences of complying with a filed tariff.
The Commission considers waivers on a case-by-case basis where: (1) the applicant acted in good faith; (2) the waiver is of limited scope; (3) the waiver addresses a concrete problem; and (4) the waiver does not have undesirable consequences, such as harming third parties. The Commission must adhere to these principles to maintain a stable, predictable environment that supports the scale of energy investment we need today.
Petitioners seek to turn the principles on their head. They would elevate a developer’s financial interest in a particular project above the broader public interest, undermining the foundational premise of readiness deposits, shifting millions of dollars in costs to other interconnection customers, and disrupting orderly interconnection queue administration.
Petitioners’ story is a familiar one. A developer submits a new service request and readiness deposits as it proceeds through interconnection study phases. Faced with evolving market conditions that disrupt a project’s economic viability (in this case, disappearing Inflation Reduction Act credits), the developer withdraws from the queue, forfeiting the deposits. At such point, the deposits protect other interconnection customers by offsetting the cost of underfunded network upgrades that would otherwise then unfairly fall upon them.
This is the Tariff working exactly as designed and as the Commission accepted. Readiness deposits assign risk to project developers and allow PJM to more quickly and efficiently process new service requests into finalized interconnection agreements. Yet petitioners seek waiver to evade these Tariff requirements and the real world consequences that everyone must face under such circumstances.
Today’s order correctly pinpoints the undesirable consequences that granting this waiver would cause—tens of millions of dollars in costs shifted to project developers that remain in the queue to fund twenty remaining upgrades. Cost shifts of that magnitude in the final stages of the interconnection process cause direct financial harm to other interconnection customers and could make remaining projects less viable, creating an untenable cascade of financial consequences.
Developers certainly face challenges in building much-needed energy infrastructure projects. But the Commission cannot convert every market shift into a waiver‑worthy event without effectively rewriting tariffs on an ad hoc basis. Regulatory stability is a foundational pillar of well-functioning markets that the Commission must foster and preserve. Granting this waiver would undermine those foundational market dynamics by sending a signal that any project developer who encounters challenging economics may circumvent a Tariff’s financial consequences by seeking individualized relief. A financial commitment that evaporates when circumstances shift is not a commitment at all. The resulting uncertainty would corrode the incentives that PJM’s readiness requirements were explicitly designed to reinforce and have profound destabilizing effects on orderly queue administration. Such outcome would be particularly unacceptable given the current PJM environment.
For these reasons, we respectfully concur.