NEW ORLEANS — MISO members haven’t landed on easy answers in getting the approximately 54 GW of unfinished generation that has cleared the interconnection queue online sooner. 

MISO’s Advisory Committee convened March 12 during Board Week to focus on the footprint’s lagging generation projects and how future delays could be prevented. (See MISO Members to Explore Ways to Rev Up Stalled Generation Builds.) 

Despite the focus on commercial operation delays, members agreed later in the meeting that energy storage will eventually flourish in the footprint. 

Illinois Commerce Commissioner Michael Carrigan said some increased transparency from MISO about the challenges in getting generation online would be helpful. He said he appreciated the RTO’s new reporting on the status of approved projects’ commercial operation dates but said more detail on the delays would be valuable for stakeholders. 

Wisconsin Public Service Commissioner Marcus Hawkins said he has observed delayed projects inch past their original budgets into cost overruns. “So, ratepayers are affected by these delays.” 

Multiple stakeholders also said the delays are set to affect states’ resource plans. 

Clean Grid Alliance’s Beth Soholt said states and load-serving entities might consider speeding up their procurement timelines or consider changing their permitting processes. She said that she, like many, “underappreciated” how decisively the COVID-19 pandemic upended the generation development cycle. Soholt said some developers struggled with virtual meetings while land agreements languished without construction. “There’s still a hangover there.” 

Soholt also noted that MISO has introduced several rule changes in its interconnection queue over the last few years, which may have some developers scrambling. 

“Interconnection customers have been living by the rules that MISO has set,” she said. 

Hawkins suggested that the full effect of the RTO’s latest rule changes — the stepped-up fees, automatic withdrawal penalties, more rigorous proof of land rights and annual megawatt cap — have yet to settle in. Hawkins said he thinks projects that are processed in the stricter environment will arrive better vetted. However, he said, stakeholders might have to accept that the energy transition may be interspersed with failed plans for generation projects. 

“I think this just might be some of the new normal … this presence of stalled or delayed resources,” Hawkins said. 

Soholt said that while a lot of the responsibility for delayed projects is “rightly” on interconnection customers, she asked for a dialogue with transmission owners on what can be done about their own staff shortages and supply chain woes that grind network upgrades to a halt. 

“All it says is, ‘TO Delay.’ So, can we get more granular?” Soholt asked of TOs’ reports to FERC. She also requested that more light be shed on how TOs prioritize construction of network upgrades. She said interconnection customers don’t know enough about what causes network upgrade bottlenecks. 

Pelican Power’s Tia Elliott suggested that stakeholders and MISO create a method to match existing projects in the queue to a nearby LSE’s forecasted needs.  

The Union of Concerned Scientists’ Sam Gomberg asked if it was worth examining the RTO’s generator interconnection agreement contracts to see if there are any impediments or out-of-date language. 

Alliant Energy’s Mitchell Myhre said MISO’s proposed resource addition lane for its queue should help get projects online faster. (See MISO Says Queue Fast Track Design Settled, Ready for FERC.) The RTO is set to file that proposal imminently. 

But Gomberg said he did not see how an express lane in the queue would keep those projects from running into the same “buzz saws” of delays that plague projects in the traditional queue. 

Soholt said MISO should have been focused on its existing queue all along instead of introducing “chaos” with a fast lane, in which projects will need transmission capacity alongside the projects in the regular queue.  

At a meeting of the MISO Board of Directors’ System Planning Committee on March 11, Aubrey Johnson, the RTO’s vice president of system planning and competitive transmission, said members have recently been picking up the pace on generation additions despite the delays. He said members managed to add a record 7.5 GW in nameplate capacity in 2024, up from 5.6 GW in 2023 and 3.5 GW in 2022. In the first half of 2025, the RTO expects to have 5 GW in new nameplate capacity. Members have added 1.4 GW in nameplate capacity since the beginning of the year. 

The interconnection queue contains 308 GW across 1,695 projects; 145 GW of that is solar generation. 

Johnson also said he hopes the recently approved megawatt cap on annual entrants in the queue ends the “mad rush” of projects in recent years and leads to more thoughtful development. 

Storage in the Wings

Later in the Advisory Committee meeting, members agreed that while storage might be a slow burn now, it will heat up in the 2030s.  

MISO should contemplate new rules now, they agreed. 

The RTO has just 164 MW of operational storage in its market, with about 2.7 GW approved and waiting to come online. Its interconnection queue contains 61 GW of nameplate capacity across 388 storage project proposals. 

Executive Director of Markets Innovation and Strategy Zak Joundi said that although storage is in its “infancy” and growing modestly in the footprint, the RTO expects 12 GW of storage around 2030 to become 53 GW by 2043. 

Gomberg predicted a rapid deployment of storage in the coming years and said MISO needs to hammer out appropriate market rules to compensate the “versatile” resources that can supply capacity, as well as relieve transmission constraints. 

Myhre said he anticipates the jump in storage will mimic the rise in wind capacity that began about two decades ago. He said megawatts will quickly multiply into gigawatts, with the RTO and stakeholders “learning together” to draw up participation rules. 

Jim Dauphinais, representing a collection of MISO end-use customers, said that while battery storage will prove important, the current technology is still limited to about four hours of output. 

“It doesn’t give us the same thing as a generation with a sustained supply of fuel. … While it can plug the gap, it can’t solve the exit of large generation resources,” he said. 

Dauphinais also said storage technologies are only going to be pursued to the extent that they earn revenues. He urged the RTO to begin forming market signals. 

NextEra Energy’s Erin Murphy said storage developers right now may be hesitant to build in MISO because of the investment uncertainty over their accreditation values. 

Joundi acknowledged that the RTO has work to do on modeling how storage would contribute to the grid. But he also said current storage volumes are low. 

Murphy pressed MISO to begin modeling work even with a small sample size.  

“We have to say, ‘We’re going to put a stake in the ground and begin,’” Murphy said.