MISO is examining additional measures to shave the time its customers spend in the generation interconnection queue, this time focusing on the definitive planning phase (DPP) and negotiations on interconnection agreements.

The effort follows on FERC’s December approval of a Tariff provision intended to help expedite the queue through more stringent site control requirements. (See MISO OK’d to Require Site Control in Queue.)

MISO now says its goal is to cut the time it takes to clear generation interconnection agreement (GIA) negotiations and the queue’s three-part DPP, where the RTO performs interconnection studies.

Currently, the DPP process alone takes about a year. Combined with the agreement negotiations, the timeline shoots up to about 505 days. MISO aims to have both processes take a year total.

“Three hundred sixty-five days is the goal, and we want to strive for efficiencies wherever possible,” interconnection engineer Cody Doll told stakeholders during a Interconnection Process Working Group conference call Tuesday. “Basically, we need to find a way to cut out 140 days from phase one to the end of negotiations.”

MISO’s interconnection queue contains 434 projects totaling 67.4 GW. It takes one project about three years to complete the queue.

Doll said if the process could be shortened to a year, it would help further MISO’s goal of aligning the separate planning processes for its interconnection queue and annual Transmission Expansion Plan. (See MISO Begins Bid to Merge Tx, Queue Planning.)

“This is basically a companion to that effort ongoing in other MISO forums,” Doll said.

MISO could crop about 60 days from phase one, Doll said, by getting a head start on its study models prior to the start of the DPP. He also said it could get a jump on developing mitigation plans by inputting in advance of the DPP some results from the screening analyses interconnection customers undergo before entering the queue. It could also probably devote less time to mitigation development, where the RTO recommends solutions to grid constraints, he said.

“The most projects drop out in phase one. It’s just the nature of the beast, so it might be unnecessary to have as many back-and-forths in phase one because it’s probably going to change,” Doll said. “Phase two and three are already pretty lean. I don’t think there’s really any fat to trim in phase two.”

In fact, he said, phase two has such an aggressive timeline that he recommends MISO add about 10 days to the existing 45-day timeline it gives itself to conduct system impact studies.

For phase three, Doll said MISO could begin using “engineering judgement” to begin some network upgrade facility studies immediately after the system impact study is complete and the project owner decides whether to stay in the queue. The current queue process prescribes a 40-day wait time between the owner’s decision point and the start of an upgrade study.

But Doll said MISO could prune the most time from the existing 150-day timeline for GIA negotiations. He said it envisions the process could take about 44 days.

“A lot of GIA negotiations can occur concurrently with the network upgrade facility study,” Doll explained.

He also said interconnection customers likely don’t need 60 days to decide to execute a drafted GIA, and transmission owners don’t need the allotted 30 days to decide the same.

Doll said that if everything goes according to plan, the new one-year process could potentially be introduced within two years. But he stressed that the plan so far is only a draft.

“We’re going to make edits on this based on comments and rehash some things,” Doll said.