CAISO’s Interconnection Process Enhancements proposal faces protests from independent power producers, clean energy organizations, and renewable energy developers at FERC. Challengers claim that CAISO’s scoring criteria provide undue influence to load-serving entities (LSEs) and may violate principles of open access.

CAISO’s proposal addresses the backlog in its interconnection queue by prioritizing projects in zones with available transmission capacity and capping the number of projects moving forward. However, critics argue the reforms provide LSEs broad discretion to influence which interconnection requests move to the study process. Protestors further claim that the proposal provides LSEs preferential access to interconnection service for their own projects or may enable LSEs to enact barriers to entry for competing projects.  CAISO has suggested that this controversial criterion could be severed from the rest of the reforms, but there is disagreement among stakeholders on whether this would resolve the issues. CAISO requests that the Commission accept the tariff revisions proposed in its application effective October 1, 2024.

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