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The following is a contributed article by Steven Schleimer, senior vice president of government and regulatory affairs at Calpine Corporation.
In his dissent to a Nov. 19, 2020, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Order on Rehearing related to ISO New England s Competitive Auctions with Sponsored Policy Resources (CASPR) construct (Docket ER18-619-001), Chairman Richard Glick questions the need for a Minimum Offer Price Rule (MOPR) and whether the concept of investor confidence should be a lodestar that matters in FERC s decision-making. Regardless of how the debate on any particular market mechanism plays out, it is of course true that investors countenance investments based on the expectation that they can recover their capital (including an adequate return). The key market design question is whether investors or ratepayers should bear the risk that the investment choices were sound.
Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies, has a simple explanation for why U.S. transmission grid policy has stalled the growth of wind and solar power.
“If you talk to a developer, they will say [that] the grid operators and transmission owners are woefully slow and unpredictable in terms of what it costs to connect, and the process is extremely frustrating,” he said in a Monday interview.
“If you talk to the grid operators, they’ll say, Renewables developers keep throwing in different projects, [so] I have to study each of them and when I give them an answer, they drop out of the queue and I have to go back and study everything else. ”