FERC said last week that MISO does not need a waiver of its Tariff requirements in order to provide Entergy Texas with make-whole payments.
The commission decided MISO is free to determine whether to give Entergy about $4,000 in make-whole payments for a late 2018 manual redispatch of its Sabine 5 natural gas plant without FERC approval. The commission dismissed the waiver request as unnecessary (ER20-1901).
The Sabine facility initially had a day-ahead volume award of 450 MW with a ramp rate of 3 MW/minute. According to MISO, its system dispatched the unit below its day-ahead volume to only 191 MW at 6 p.m. A few minutes later, the grid operator manually redispatched Sabine 5 to return to its day-ahead schedule volume, which took the plant three five-minute intervals to reach. MISO then denied Entergy day-ahead margin assurance payments for the three intervals while the plant was ramping.
The RTO said its system is currently incapable of taking a resource’s offered ramp rate into consideration during a manual redispatch setpoint directive. It also said its rules don’t allow it to pay out day-ahead margin assurance compensation based on after-the-fact adjustments to manual redispatch setpoint instructions.
Entergy sought informal alternative dispute resolution over the partially paid ramping intervals. MISO concluded it should reimburse the utility $4,064.74, the amount it would have received had it been allowed day-ahead margin assurance payments for the three intervals in question.
The RTO said Entergy “should not be harmed for following MISO’s instructions” but that it needed to seek a Tariff waiver in order to issue the payment.
The commission disagreed, saying MISO is authorized to make the payment without a waiver.
“After reviewing MISO’s filing and Tariff, we find that it is not necessary to revise, alter or waive any provision of the Tariff to implement the ADR determination. Instead, consistent with the ADR determination, MISO can update the manual redispatch setpoint … instructions to take into account a resource’s offered ramp rate for resettlement purposes,” FERC said.
