The US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has approved reforms to the California Independent System Operator’s (CAISO) interconnection process, which came into force on October 1.
Under FERC's newly approved protocols, interconnection requests submitted to the California ISO during the annual application window will be evaluated based on commercial interest, project feasibility, and system demand.
Projects will then be ranked according to their potential to move forward to the study phase, where they will undergo a more thorough assessment.
The screening process is intended to increase the certainty of interconnection customers, load-serving entities, and the ISO when the study of their applications is complete.
ISO submitted its request on August 1, following over a year of engagement with various stakeholders and industry representatives.
As of last year, the CAISO network had an interconnection queue totaling more than 500GW of projects waiting to come online - causing major delays in bringing new renewable power capacity online.
“If I wanted to build a project, starting in California today, it might be eight or more years before that project is actually delivering any power to the grid,” Oliver Kerr, managing director for North America at Aurora Energy Research, recently told DCD.
The approved reforms aim to build on the standards introduced last July through FERC Order No. 2023, which set new guidelines for interconnection procedures nationwide.
FERC has given conditional approval to the ISO’s interconnection changes, pending its review of the ISO’s compliance filing for Order No. 2023, submitted in May.
According to Jan Shori, the board chair of CAISO, the rationale behind the changes was to accommodate “explosive growth in the number of applications for grid interconnection studies the past three years” and provide “a new and improved process to prioritize and determine which projects are the most viable and which will meet our resource adequacy and reliability needs in a timely manner over the next 20 years.”
