The two-Republican majority on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has issued another set of decisions that will aid fossil-fuel power plants at the expense of renewable energy and energy storage — this time in New York.
On Thursday, FERC Chairman Neil Chatterjee and Commissioner Bernard McNamee voted to reject proposals from New York state agencies and its grid operator, NYISO, to allow up to 1,000 megawatts of renewable energy, and up to 300 megawatts of electrical energy storage resources per year, to be exempt from “buyer-side mitigation” rules.
The exemptions were sought last year to allow those resources to participate in NYISO’s capacity market without being forced to bid at an administratively determined minimum price instead of their true cost. New York, which has set a goal of 70 percent renewables by 2030 and 100 percent clean energy by 2040, argued that the rules are meant to prevent utilities that own generation from gaming the market, not to restrict new resources.
But Chatterjee and McNamee rejected New York’s requests, a move critics say could price those renewable and storage resources out of NYISO’s capacity market and provide an advantage to otherwise economically uncompetitive fossil-fuel-fired power plants.
FERC Chairman Chatterjee, previously a senior aide to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), wrote that the decisions would help “send accurate price signals to markets and to ensure adequate supplies for consumers.”
Richard Glick, the sole Democrat on FERC, voted against Thursday’s decisions. In his Thursday dissent, he excoriated the decision as an attempt by his Republican colleagues to “prop up prices, lock in the current resource mix, and attack state policies that promote clean energy.”
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