By Amanda Durish Cook

MISO staff will commence work on a project to better align generation interconnections and transmission planning after stakeholders retired the task team charged with suggesting ways to bridge the two processes.

Stakeholders created the Coordinated Planning Process Task Team in November to probe how MISO could increase coordination between the separate studies underpinning the RTO’s Transmission Expansion Plan (MTEP) and its generator interconnection queue process.

The team in February forwarded MISO’s Planning Advisory Committee and Planning Subcommittee a list of topics to address. (See MISO Committees Tackle Queue, Tx Planning Disparities.) With the task list in hand, the PAC on Wednesday voted to retire the team during a teleconference.

MISO will now examine the two study processes as a first step in possibly unifying them. Senior Manager of Expansion Planning Edin Habibovic said the RTO would begin with “an in-depth review of MISO planning study objectives, methodologies and assumptions.”

“MISO believes it is prudent to review MISO’s planning processes, identify correlation and document rationale for any disparities between them,” Habibovic said during a Planning Subcommittee teleconference Tuesday.

Habibovic said the review will occur in planning meetings and special meetings scheduled through August.

MISO renewable proponents and some state regulators have repeatedly contended that the RTO unfairly relies on interconnection customers to finance increasingly expensive new transmission capacity under the pretext of network upgrades and may be neglecting its responsibility to get major projects approved in its transmission packages. Renewable advocates have questioned why interconnection studies show the need for expensive transmission upgrades when studies performed under the MTEP do not.

Stakeholders have suggested MISO better align the timelines of interconnection and MTEP planning and ensure the studies draw on similar data, including dispatch assumptions. The synchronization effort could have the RTO approving more transmission projects by MTEP 2021. (See MISO Seeks Ideas for Streamlined Tx Planning.)

MISO is currently juggling 10 separate queue cycles among its four planning regions, with five additional cycles set to begin over the next year. Senior Manager of Economic Planning Neil Shah said the unusually high number of queue cycles being processed in unison will be an obstacle to aligning timelines with MTEP.