Federal Energy Commission Suggests Changes in Variable Energy Resources Ruling

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has mooted several proposals that will bring in cheers to the solar, wind wave power or tidal power producers. The reforms are aimed at unifying energy from various energy sources into the national power grid while assuring functional consistency, operational stability and cost savings to the clients.

The commission is planning to introduce changes that will involve the public utility power transmission providing companies to provide the choice to the clients to schedule their transmission services at 15 minutes time intervals instead of the presently prevailing hourly arrangement process. According to the commission, its initial findings indicate that the prevailing practice of hour scheduling, the absence of VER (variable energy resources) power generation estimating and the absence of apparent methods to reclaim the cost of offering generator regularization services leads to unwarranted bias and unfair rates due to the entry of number of VERs over the power grid. The proposal requests the interconnection clients to offer weather forecasts and operational data to allow the transmission providers to use them for estimating power generation. The commission’s proposal elucidates that the transmission service providers can recover the costs involved in providing the VER integrated services by proving that it has adapted to time rescheduling and power production estimating to make certain that VER’s are charged at reasonable rates.

The commission earlier during January has published a Notice of Inquiry to evaluate some of its regulative strategies to assess the requirement of changes in connecting the VERs to the power grid. The commission after reviewing the public comments and the comments from the stakeholders has issued a set of changes to address the unjustified bias and irrational rates currently present. The changes will be made into a rule after the lapse of the 60 day public observation period.