By Amanda Durish Cook
Transmission buildout costs in MISO West under the 2020 expansion plan will look much the same as last year’s, RTO officials said last week.
The officials offered that prediction at MISO’s first West Subregional Planning Meeting of the year on Thursday. The meeting is part of a series held by subregions as MISO begins assembling its 2020 Transmission Expansion Plan (MTEP 20).
Some stakeholders have expressed concern over transmission development in MISO West — encompassing Minnesota, Iowa, parts of the Dakotas and western Wisconsin. They complain that proposed renewable generation in the RTO’s interconnection queue is inhibited in recent years by a lack of new capacity combined with prohibitively expensive network upgrades.
MISO has convened a special task team to address the increasing cost of network upgrades in its interconnection queue. Possible solutions involve linking the RTO’s annual transmission planning process with network upgrade planning. The synchronization could have MISO approving more transmission projects. (See MISO Seeks Ideas for Streamlined Tx Planning.) However, those changes will begin with MTEP 21, not MTEP 20.
MISO so far estimates similar spending on transmission buildout in West under MTEP 20 when compared to 2019, with both at nearly $790 million.
“We’ll likely have fewer proposed projects this year, but the investment remains the same,” MISO Manager of Expansion Planning Zheng Zhou told stakeholders.
Of that investment, transmission upgrades to accommodate interconnecting generators is predicted to increase year-over-year, from $103 million in MTEP 19 to a projected $133 million in MTEP 20.
MISO has yet to perform independent planning assessments on the MTEP 20 projects proposed by transmission owners. The assessments could identify project alternatives.
Meanwhile, the RTO continues to try to clear MISO West projects from its nearly 82-GW interconnection queue. It is working on negotiating and finalizing generation interconnection agreements for the two remaining generation projects representing 245 MW that entered the interconnection queue in the February 2017 cycle. That cycle once contained more than 5 GW of proposed wind and solar projects, and it was the sharp drop-off of generation projects that caused the stakeholder community to take notice of the transmission-constrained western region.
MISO also said it’s preparing generation interconnection agreements for 13 West projects at about 2.3 GW that entered the queue in August 2016. It identified about $269 million in necessary network upgrades for those projects.
Finally, the RTO reports that affected-system studies are ongoing for the crop of 27 West projects — comprising 4.1 GW — that entered the queue in August 2017.
MISO will hold two more West planning meetings before MTEP 20 approval, one in either May or June and another in August.
