With a challenging summer in the rearview, MISO expects more traditional reliability risks this fall while making blueprints for an industry roiled by change.

MISO’s relatively low 114-GW summer peak in early July and average $21/MWh real-time prices belied a whirlwind season containing two emergency declarations. The peak was lower than both the grid operator’s projection (125 GW) and last summer’s peak (121 GW).

In late summer, MISO directed its first load-shed event after Hurricane Laura ripped through the heel of Louisiana. (See MISO Keeps Advisories in Effect a Week After Laura.)

MISO Executive Director of Market Operations Shawn McFarlane said the RTO began preparations for the hurricane about a week before the storm’s landfall. At the grid operator’s orders on Aug. 27, Entergy shed about 573 MW of load in the West of the Atchafalaya Basin load pocket.

The load-shed orders maintained grid stability and kept MISO South from experiencing cascading outages, McFarlane said during a summer review Sept. 15 before the Board of Directors’ Markets Committee.

MISO estimated that uplift payments totaled $90 million during the event. McFarlane said that is the largest the RTO has ever experienced from a single episode.

It could take until the end of October to restore power to all Louisiana ratepayers, based on Entergy’s restoration estimate, he said. About 80,000 Entergy customers remain without power, down from approximately 700,000 immediately after the storm.

McFarlane also said MISO monitored Hurricane Sally, which was brewing in the Gulf of Mexico before ultimately tracking east of its footprint.

The grid operator continues to review the Laura event and will hold future stakeholder discussions during the Market Subcommittee’s public session, McFarlane said. Subcommittee Chair Megan Wisersky has proposed a special joint meeting with the Reliability Subcommittee on Oct. 1 to discuss the hurricane’s impact on the grid.

RTO executives also reported that proactive communication with other grid operators was much improved during its other maximum generation event on July 7, when MISO Midwest was seized by a stubborn heat wave.

“It’s good to hear that coordination has improved. That’s what the public expects of us,” Board Chairman Phyllis Currie said.

“This was an exciting quarter. Usually I begin by saying it was an uninteresting quarter,” Independent Market Monitor David Patton said.

Patton said he is concerned about the availability of supply in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, which racked up high congestion costs this summer. He said three resources in one transmission pricing zone that cleared the annual Planning Resource Auction were unavailable for most of the summer.

“They provided us virtually no value during the summer,” he said.

MISO: Fall Emergency a Possibility

McFarlane said MISO expects near normal load going forward.

“Load levels will more or less be at the level of what we call non-COVID,” McFarlane told the board. “We haven’t totally confirmed this, but our suspicion was air conditioning load was making up for economic impacts” during the summer, he said, explaining that mostly empty offices were still being temperature controlled while widespread work-from-home employees kept their houses comfortable too.

MISO might have to declare an emergency this fall if conditions are right, despite its 152 GW of available capacity paired with a 113-GW forecasted seasonal peak.

“As we say every quarter, if we end up in a high-load, high-outage situation, it may require access of our emergency resources,” McFarlane said.

He said higher outages paired with extreme weather conditions could lead to tightening supply. MISO said it’s preparing to work around more outages than usual this year, as the pandemic lockdowns in spring led to maintenance rescheduling.

“In the spring, 20 GW of outages were deferred,” McFarlane said.

MISO expects to have a little more than 115 GW of total available capacity in September after factoring in outages. If load stays at normal levels — about 112 GW — the grid operator doesn’t foresee a problem. But if high demand pushes load to 119 GW, MISO will have to dip into at least a few gigawatts of its 14.6 GW in load-modifying resources and operating reserves. The supply picture worsens if MISO has only 104.1 GW of capacity, as predicted by its worst-case outage scenario.

The RTO said that as usual, the largest amount of generation outages are slated to occur in October and November. It said the two months contain the highest potential for significant generation outages on monthly peak days.

MISO projects about 94.2 GW of available capacity in October with nearly 90 GW of usual load and a 95.2-GW high load. Increased outages could cull capacity to just 90.6 GW, making emergency measures all but certain in a high-demand scenario.

In November, MISO said available capacity should rise to 97 GW, handling both a typical 90.3 GW load and a 95.7 GW high load. However, if generation doesn’t return as expected, MISO could have just 92.6 GW of capacity on hand during the month, spurring operational challenges.

Changes Ahead

MISO Executive Director Ken McIntyre, a former NERC and ERCOT staffer, is helping the RTO modernize its operations and markets as the electric industry moves toward renewable and more dispersed generation.

“Today, we rely on operator experience and years and years of on-the-job-training. Tomorrow, we will have to rely on advanced monitoring and decision-support tools that predict conditions and provide guidance. Today, more days are the same. Tomorrow, more days will be different. The seasonal and peak demand profiles will become … less obvious and less meaningful for day-to-day operations,” McIntyre said.

He said MISO can launch automated tools using artificial intelligence in control rooms that can “pre-position the grid” for extreme weather or outages.

Vice President of System Planning Jennifer Curran said operations decisions will rely more on artificial intelligence and automated processes in the future.

“Today, we rely on operators with years of experience, and many of them are near retirement,” Curran said during the full board’s Thursday meeting. “There’s not a ready pool of additionally experienced operators to replace them.”

Director Barbara Krumsiek asked how MISO might incorporate “non-traditional forecasting arenas,” such as social forces, to predict energy demand. She pointed out that a coronavirus vaccine’s introduction could rally the economy and cause electricity demand to spike.

McIntyre said MISO might gather society trends by “scraping” data on social media to influence forecasts.

Patton also said MISO should transition to a “more sophisticated, probabilistic forecast” in their control rooms. He said that when faced with tight conditions, MISO tends to overcommit resources. That overcompensation often results in high revenue-sufficiency guarantee payments but low LMPs, he said.

“The tools could be much better to let operators make more surgical decisions,” he said.