MISO has temporarily backed off requiring load-serving entities to provide the location and capacity values of distributed energy resources for its planning models.

Planning Modeling Manager Amanda Schiro said the requirement for LSEs to provide counts of inverter-based DERs on distribution systems has been downgraded to a request for 2021.

Schiro said this year’s request is only intended to allow MISO to get a better handle on DER siting. She said the RTO is only in a “data-gathering mode” to possibly introduce future modeling improvements that better capture DERs.

MISO wants LSEs to provide more explicit DER estimates for transmission planning models by 2022.

DERs are registered in the capacity market but not represented in the RTO’s planning models, Schiro said. She said DER integration into reliability planning and operations and market systems will soon necessitate a modeling change.

Summer peak load continues to drop slightly every year, and DERs could play a role in that, Schiro said.

“We want to plan for the situation we’re going to find ourselves in,” she said.

For now, MISO needs more information to decide how to represent DER in modeling, Director of Planning Jeff Webb said.

“We’re trying to just get an understanding of what’s out there,” he said, agreeing with stakeholders that MISO must engage in more discussion with LSEs before it adopts a new approach for better estimating DER in planning models.

Some LSE representatives have expressed skepticism over MISO’s DER modeling goals.

WEC Energy Group’s Chris Plante said many LSEs already include in their forecasts any DERs they have insights into. He also said it might be impossible for MISO to locate all DERs.

“In some cases, it might not be practical to model some DERs because some might be behind the customers’ meter, and we have nothing to do with it,” Plante said.

MTEP Transfers Under Study

MISO has defined the transmission transfers it will study in its 2020 Transmission Expansion Plan (MTEP 20) to determine the system’s capability for handling various transfer scenarios.

The RTO is studying nine transfers under the MTEP 20 voltage stability analysis, which seeks to find future “soft spots” that might cause contingencies on the system. Three of the transfer scenarios will focus on transfer paths from Minnesota to areas in Wisconsin and Illinois, while two others focus on exports into the Downstream of Gypsy area near New Orleans from other Entergy territories.

The analysis also includes:

• Minnesota and North Dakota’s exports into Manitoba Hydro territory;
• Indiana and southern Michigan’s exports to the St. Louis area;
• exports from Iowa into the MISO Central planning region of Indiana, Illinois, western Kentucky and eastern Missouri; and
• MISO South to the West of the Atchafalaya Basin load pocket straddling Texas and Louisiana.

Additionally, MISO is studying five transfers under its NERC-required transfer study, used to determine the ability of the MISO system to handle possible power transfers across the footprint:

• MISO’s South Region to SPP;
• Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator to MISO’s East planning region;
• MISO Central to the North planning regions in both directions; and
• PJM’s Northern Illinois territory to the rest of its footprint east of Indiana.

Nearly all the transfers were chosen based on heavy historical usage; however, the PJM transfer was selected because of an influx of wind generation additions in the area by 2025.

At the end of last month, MTEP 20 contained 510 proposed projects at a combined $4.06 billion. (See Price Tag Rising for MTEP 20.) Those figures will remain fluid as MISO finalizes the transmission package over the next three months.

MTEP 20 is also on a shorter-than-usual timeline this year.

MISO announced earlier this year that it will revise the MTEP 20 schedule to allow the Board of Directors’ System Planning Committee an additional month to review the transmission package prior to the full board vote in early December. That means the PAC will review, then vote on, whether to recommend the draft MTEP 20 report about a month earlier than usual, in September instead of October. (See “MTEP 20 Schedule Change,” Northern Focus for MTEP 20.)

PAC Chair Cynthia Crane has said the truncated MTEP timeline caused “some consternation” among stakeholders. “As much as everyone wants to give the board extra time to review, it’s going to take a month out of the process to form the MTEP,” Crane reported to the MISO Steering Committee in February.