By Amanda Durish Cook

MISO’s Board of Directors last week cleared the Advisory Committee to create an 11th stakeholder sector while also instructing the committee to overhaul its sector design to produce a fuller participatory model.

The board said the committee’s recent recommendation to create a new “Affiliate” sector for hard-to-define members works only in the short term. It directed it to develop a long-term solution that guarantees all members full participation in the stakeholder process. (See MISO Advisory Committee OKs 11th Sector.)

In the meantime, MISO should file with FERC revisions to its Transmission Owners’ Agreement (TOA) to include the new sector, the board said.

Board Chair Phyllis Currie said the board met to discuss the proposal and agreed that it should be in place only until the AC creates a new proposal focused on fair participation for sectors and mindful of voting power. She also said the AC should ensure that sectors are divided into groupings of likeminded members.

“I say ‘short term’ because I think in the longer term, there still needs to be more discussion on how various sectors participate,” Currie said during a committee conference call Wednesday. The meeting took place via conference call instead of in New Orleans as originally planned because of the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus. (See Virus Fear Sends MISO Board Week to the Web.)

Currie urged the AC to examine its current voting structure and think about affording members an equal voice. She said the board would give the committee a year to draft a fuller solution for incoming — and increasingly diverse — members.

The new sector would not be allowed a vote in either AC or Planning Advisory Committee matters, but it would have one designated seat for AC meetings and be allowed to offer opinions during the committee’s quarterly hot topic discussions.

The sector would serve as a home for any MISO member that isn’t participating in another sector. Prospective MISO members must declare a sector affiliation before they can join the RTO.

“I think other interest groups, other businesses, other NGOs will come to the table,” Director Nancy Lange told the AC.

The AC began debating the merits of an 11th sector last year when Lignite Energy Council, a North Dakota coal lobbying group, approached MISO about membership. The organization did not fit neatly into any of the existing 10 sectors and was almost relegated to the Environmental and Other Stakeholder Groups sector. But some AC members said it wasn’t appropriate for a sector to contain entities with diametrically opposed views and said the new sector was necessary to allow the Environmental/Other sector to have a singular voice. The Environmental/Other sector would be able to drop its “other” designation if FERC accepts the changes to the TOA.

Environmental/Other sector representative Beth Soholt said that, save for the Energy Storage Association, all other entities in the sector have an environmental focus.

So far, the proposed Affiliate sector seems destined for a fossil-fuel focus — at least at the onset. LEC indicated that it has drummed up interest among other entities interested in joining the new sector, including coal and iron mining organizations, coal trade organization America’s Power and various chambers of commerce.

LEC CEO Jason Bohrer said his organization had been “working on earning a seat at the table for the past 18 months.” He said the board’s decision was “a significant step in this long process.”

“We applaud the work of the MISO Advisory Council, the Board of Directors and MISO staff, as well as our partners like America’s Power, for their support of opening up the regional market planning stakeholder process to more voices and perspectives, which now will include coal producers along with chambers of commerce and other organizations that have strong electricity market interests,” Bohrer said in an email to RTO Insider. “We look forward to providing a strong voice for the coal miners and utilities who provide the electricity that is the ‘always-on’ backbone for the electric grid and the economy in our region.”

Hot Topic Panel Delayed

On the same conference call, the AC postponed the policy discussion portion of its meeting until June.

The committee was supposed to hold a panel-style discussion featuring industry experts as its quarterly hot topic discussion during the March Board Week. The panel was meant to focus on how RTOs deal with resource transition and would have featured one executive apiece from NYISO, CAISO and ERCOT. However, AC leadership said a panel discussion was too difficult to navigate in a teleconference-only format.