MISO board members on Monday gave an initial nod to MISO’s $4 billion 2020 Transmission Expansion Plan (MTEP 20).
In a special Oct. 26 conference call, the four-member System Planning Committee of MISO’s Board of Directors voted unanimously to send MTEP 20 to a full board vote in early December.
Director Mark Johnson said the committee’s voting took place about a month earlier than usual this year to allow more time for the full board of directors to deliberate about the plan.
MTEP 20’s 515 projects include 75 baseline reliability projects, accounting for 18% of the plan’s cost, but they still come in $70 million below MTEP 19’s crop of baseline projects. It also includes 100 generator interconnection projects, representing 15% of costs.
MISO said it’s normal to have boom-and-bust investment years in terms of baseline reliability projects. This year most baseline projects are located within the Central planning region, which account for $372 million.
Executive Director of System Planning Aubrey Johnson said while MTEP 20’s spending tracks closely with the 2019 package, spending on generator interconnection projects increased from $269 million last year to $606 million this year.
“We’ve seen an almost three times increase of interconnection projects from this year to last, and we attribute that to clearing out some of the [interconnection queue] backlog,” he said.
MISO’s Planning Advisory Committee approved MTEP 20 in September; however, some members asked that MISO be more specific about the breakdown of projects in its “other” category. (See “Members Endorse MTEP 20,” MISO Planning Advisory Comm. Briefs: Sept. 23, 2020.)
The “other” category includes load growth-based projects, age and condition-based upgrades, and economic, environmental and reliability-driven projects. It usually represents the lion’s share of MTEP spending and this year accounts for $2.8 billion. MISO said 40% of “other” projects are needed for reliability, 36% for age and condition, 21% for load growth and 2% for other local transmission owner needs. RTO executives said some load pockets are experiencing load growth, even if it’s not occurring footprint-wide.
“The old proverbial ‘other’ bucket, I really encourage MISO to refine that. … It’s just a little too nondescript, and I know I’m not the first director to raise this issue with MISO management,” Mark Johnson said.
“More definition would be helpful,” agreed Director Todd Raba.
MISO executives also briefed the board of directors on the removal of Entergy Louisiana’s nearly $74 million, 27-mile, 230-kV, Waterford-to-Churchill transmission line approved as part of MTEP 16. MISO said the line no longer demonstrates the benefits it once did. Over four years the benefit-cost ratio dropped from 2.3 to about 0.2, according to Entergy. (See “Entergy Cancels MTEP 16 Project,” MISO in Final Stretch of $4B MTEP 20.)
MISO’s agreement to rescind the project ruffled some feathers within the stakeholder community this fall.
MISO Director Nancy Lange asked whether stakeholders disagreed with the decision to withdraw the project or the opaque manner in which the decision was made.
Aubrey Johnson said some stakeholders weren’t comfortable with MISO conducting a withdrawal analysis in the background without notifying them of the study’s process or progress. He said some argued that MISO didn’t provide them time to perform their own no-harm analyses to find out if the project’s removal would negatively impact other subsequently approved MTEP projects.
“For this project, I do not believe the benefits are there. Whether we need other transmission in the area is an ongoing question,” Vice President of System Planning Jennifer Curran said.
“I think the question is, if you’re going to have projects withdraw like this, how do you present that to the stakeholders earlier in the process, if you will,” Aubrey Johnson said. He added that MISO will re-examine its process of monitoring and recommending withdrawal of MTEP approved projects.
