Order No. 2023 compliance filings differ on withdrawal penalties and deposits

Order No. 2023, issued in Docket RM22-14-000 on 28 July 2023, required every transmission provider to replace serial, first-come first-served interconnection study with a first-ready, first-served cluster process. The rule is uniform on structure. It is deliberately not uniform on price.

The Commission set commercial readiness requirements and withdrawal penalties as obligations rather than as fixed numbers, leaving each provider to propose deposits, site control demonstrations and penalty escalators appropriate to its footprint. Compliance filings therefore diverge on the one variable that determines behaviour: what a speculative position costs to hold and what it costs to abandon.

For a developer weighing whether to carry a position through a second study cycle, this is the whole calculation. A low-deposit, low-penalty regime preserves optionality and keeps the queue congested with projects that will not be built. A high-penalty regime clears the queue faster and raises the cost of being wrong about offtake.

Order No. 2023-A, in RM22-14-001, addressed rehearing arguments and clarified the treatment of study delay penalties applicable to transmission providers, the symmetrical obligation the Commission attached to its own deadlines. The clarification did not resolve the deposit divergence.

What to watch: the second full cluster cycle in each region, where withdrawal rates become observable rather than predicted.