By Tom Kleckner

FERC last week approved SPP’s revisions to its joint operating agreement with MISO that improve pseudo-tie coordination requirements between the RTOs, effective Monday (ER20-904).

The March 19 letter order accepted revisions addressing definitions, requirements, modeling, interchange schedules and general pseudo-tie coordination. SPP said the changes would improve transmission system efficiency along its seam with MISO by including obligations already in pseudo-tie agreements where MISO is the external balancing authority.

The changes include:

• adding certain definitions set forth in the NERC glossary of terms used in reliability standards;
• incorporating language requiring the native BA and the attaining BA to coordinate the pseudo-tie’s modeling in accordance with the rules of the native BA and attaining BA, respectively;
• adding new subsections to the JOA that outline authorities for pseudo-ties from one RTO into the other; and
• revising the requirements with language that includes the impacts of pseudo-ties in the attaining BA’s market flow impacts for the purposes of congestion management procedures. “Neither MISO, nor SPP, nor the entity seeking to pseudo-tie shall tag or request to tag the energy flows from a pseudo-tie into the attaining BA,” the language says.

SPP borrowed from the MISO-PJM JOA to define pseudo-ties as involving the real-time transfer of a generating resource’s or load’s control from the native BA where resource or load is physically located to an attaining BA that is responsible for operating the grid in a different geographic location.

Its pseudo-tie agreement permits load and generating resources external to the SPP BA to be served by SPP. It also allows load and generating resources internal to SPP to function as part of an external BA.

ESR Data Added to Interconnection Procedures

FERC on Tuesday accepted SPP’s Tariff revisions to include specific information related to energy storage resources (ESRs) in the grid operator’s generator interconnection procedures (ER20-918).

With the commission’s approval, the generator interconnection forms will now ask whether or not ESRs will take energy from the system when operating in charging mode and the maximum rate of charge capability.

SPP filed the request on Jan. 31, shortly after stakeholders agreed to form a steering committee charged with determining how best to integrate energy storage. (See SPP Planning Approach to Battery Storage.)