On March 25, 2024, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) denied Prairie Creek Wind, LLC’s (Prairie Creek) request for a waiver of the PJM Interconnection, L.L.C. Open Access Transmission Tariff (PJM and PJM Tariff). Prairie Creek requested the waiver to allow it to enter into an Engineering & Procurement Agreement (E&P Agreement) for its interconnection project at an earlier stage in the interconnection process than the PJM Tariff permits. This would have facilitated Prairie Creek’s efforts to interconnect at a substation being constructed for a different developer at a more advanced stage in PJM’s interconnection process.

We represented PJM in its protest to the waiver request. PJM argued that it lacked the necessary information needed to develop an E&P Agreement before the project’s Facilities Study was completed. PJM also asserted that the waiver request did not meet FERC’s criteria for granting waivers, could harm other developers, would allow Prairie Creek to “jump” from one stage of the interconnection process to another, and would be unfair to other developers in PJM. FERC agreed with PJM, concluding that Prairie Creek had not satisfied FERC’s criteria for a waiver request and failed to demonstrate that the waiver would not result in undesirable consequences, including harm to third parties.