Dive Brief:
- The PJM Interconnection’s market monitor opposes Constellation Energy’s request for waivers from the grid operator’s rules that are needed by the company to expedite its plans to restart the Crane nuclear power plant — formerly Three Mile Island Unit 1 — as part of a deal with Microsoft.
- To enable full power delivery from the Crane unit when it restarts, possibly as soon as next year, Constellation wants to transfer Capacity Interconnection Rights, or CIRs, from a fossil-fueled plant it planned to retire. The request must be approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
- The independent monitor, Monitoring Analytics, said in a Tuesday filing with the agency that the request fails to meet FERC’s standards for issuing waivers, including that it won’t hurt third parties. PJM said in its own filing that it didn’t oppose the request, but that even if the waivers are approved, future transmission analysis will determine when electricity from the Crane power plant can be fully delivered to the grid.
Dive Insight:
Constellation Energy’s $1.6 billion plan to restart the 835-MW Crane nuclear unit hit a snag when PJM determined that transmission upgrades were needed to safely deliver all the unit’s power to the grid.
Those upgrades — including 765-kV and 500-kV projects — aren’t expected to be finished until December 2030 and could be delayed even longer, preventing full deliveries from the nuclear unit, which could restart in 2027, Constellation said in its March 31 waiver request at FERC.
Constellation asked for waivers that would allow it to transfer the CIRs of its Eddystone generating units 3 and 4 near Philadelphia to Crane.
Constellation planned to retire the units on May 31, 2025, but the Department of Energy has ordered the company to them to keep running under what the DOE has described as an emergency energy shortage.
Under the DOE’s orders, the Eddystone units are not considered capacity resources, making their 760 MW of CIRs free to be transferred, according to Baltimore-based Constellation.
However, Constellation’s request fails to meet any of FERC’s criteria for granting waivers, according to Monitoring Analytics. Those criteria are that the waiver fixes an error made in good faith; the waiver is limited in scope; the waiver addresses a concrete problem; and the waiver will not have undesirable consequences, such as harming third parties.
“A waiver is not justified where a party merely seeks relief from the consequences of its own business decisions or strategic preferences,” the market monitor said.
Also, transferring the CIRs after Decision Point II in PJM’s interconnection process “could invalidate prior studies, shift upgrade costs to other interconnection customers, and generally introduce uncertainty into the queue,” the market monitor said. “The commission denies waivers where the requested relief would disrupt settled expectations or adversely affect other market participants.”
PJM said transferring the CIRs requires studies to evaluate the benefits of the move.
“This study will determine the final impact attributed to Crane, any associated cost allocations and contingent facilities, as well as ‘the total CIRs available at the new location,’” PJM said.
If FERC approves the waiver requests, that shouldn’t presuppose the outcome of any interconnection studies, PJM said.
Constellation asked FERC to approve the request by June 1.
ClearView Energy Partners said in an April 8 client note that FERC approval is “likely,” and would clear the way for Constellation to bid 760 MW from the Crane unit into PJM’s next base capacity auction, set to begin on June 30.
Even with that additional capacity, PJM’s auction for the 2028/2029 delivery year will likely clear at a proposed $325/MW-day price cap that is under review at FERC, the research firm said.
Constellation has a 20-year deal to sell all the energy, capacity and clean energy attributes from the nuclear unit to Microsoft for data centers across PJM’s Mid-Atlantic and Midwest footprint.
