The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission should resolve a three-year-old complaint that aims to address Ohio utilities’ “unchecked investment in local transmission and supplemental projects,” the Ohio ratepayer advocate said Thursday.
Local transmission projects built in Ohio by utilities owned by American Electric Power, FirstEnergy, AES and Duke Energy lack regulatory oversight and should be reviewed by FERC, according to a complaint filed at the agency in September 2023 by the Office of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, or OCC.
Since the complaint was filed, the Ohio utilities have included more than $4.3 billion of local transmission and supplemental projects in PJM’s Regional Transmission Expansion Plan, the OCC said in its motion for expedited action.
“As OCC’s complaint seeking relief for consumers languishes, Ohio transmission utilities have spent billions of dollars for local transmission and supplemental projects that no regulatory authority has reviewed for necessity, prudency, or cost-effectiveness,” the ratepayer advocate said.
Local and supplemental projects are proposed by utilities — often to replace aging infrastructure or interconnect new customers — and generally receive little regulatory oversight. PJM, for example, reviews proposed projects to make sure they don’t hurt grid reliability.
The OCC contends that local transmission and supplemental project plans have “ballooned,” partly to handle large load data centers owned by companies such as Meta, Amazon and Google.
Like other utilities in PJM, Ohio’s transmission utilities present local transmission and supplemental projects through PJM’s Attachment M-3 process, which lacks transparency, according to the OCC.
The OCC, for example, said it hasn’t received “substantive responses” from Ohio’s utilities or PJM about projects in the most recent M-3 process, according to the ratepayer advocate.
“Similarly, during PJM [Transmission Expansion Advisory Committee] meetings, questions about the impact of certain projects on consumers have been met with resistance by PJM and the Ohio transmission utilities, and allegations that such information is beyond the scope of the Attachment M-3 process approved by FERC,” the OCC said.
Ohio’s transmission utilities should be required to respond to questions about the basis for project needs, load forecast assumptions, customer commitments, consideration of alternatives, project scope, timing and expected consumer cost impacts, the OCC said.
“This complaint provides FERC the opportunity to correct the major problem that Ohio consumers see — that none of the local transmission or supplemental projects in Ohio are being reviewed for need, prudence and cost-effectiveness,” the OCC said.
However, the Ohio utilities, PJM, the Edison Electric Institute and others in November 2023 asked FERC to reject the complaint.
AEP and the other Ohio utilities said the oversight of supplemental projects is more than adequate. It includes a FERC-approved PJM transmission owners’ local planning process, the agency’s formula rate processes, the commission’s Federal Power Act section 206 complaint process and the Ohio Power Siting Board’s pre-construction review of supplemental projects larger than 100 kV, they said.
