In 2020 MISO promised a turnaround in its approach to a changing resource mix and clean energy targets by states in its footprint.

As the ‘20s roared in, the grid operator managed several intricate discussions in remote format, among them redefined reliability standards, a capacity market subdivided by season, and the launch of its first long-term transmission planning effort in a decade.

President Clair Moeller said the RTO is emerging from being “a victim of circumstance” of future renewable realities.

“We haven’t spent a lot of time trying to anticipate. That changes now,” Moeller said during the December board meeting.

‘Not Farewell, But Good Riddance’

“If we could have gone back 12 months and say that we’d be able to accomplish all this, we’d all be happy,” MISO CEO John Bear said during MISO’s annual members meeting in December. “We can choose to see 2020 as a time of resilience that we’d never want to repeat, or we can view it as preparation for changes. I think we’ll view it as the latter.”

“This year MISO wrote the playbook on how to safely and reliably serve load in uncertain times,” Transmission Owners representative Stacie Hebert said.

With pandemic-induced lockdowns and bans on in-person gatherings, MISO load bottomed out to about 10% below historically normal levels from March through May. The coronavirus’ impact decreased during summer and early fall, but with the contagion spreading unabated, load now tracks about 5% below normal.

“This is definitely not a year-over-year situation,” said MISO Executive Director of Market Operations Shawn McFarlane in May.

Through the upheaval of 2020, MISO supervised 72,000 miles of high-voltage transmission and about 184 GW of generating resources.

Hebert joked all MISO members were ready to say “not farewell, but good riddance” to 2020.

MISO rolled out a live, informal stakeholder polling feature during some online committee meetings.

“When we’re in person, it’s a lot easier to read body language and get a sense of the room,” said WEC Energy Group’s Chris Plante, chair of the Resource Adequacy Subcommittee, in August. “Are people frowning? Are they smiling? Are half of them out in hallway?”

Long-Range Transmission in the Works

MISO executives said the footprint cannot afford to wait on transmission investment and risk the system buckling under the pressures of interconnecting renewable resources. In July, it announced its first long-term transmission planning effort since 2011.

“If you love renewables, then you have to love transmission. Although no one wants to have transmission built next to them, it must happen,” Bear said during the board meeting in December. He added that MISO planners would try their best to leverage and expand existing transmission corridors. (See MISO Prepares Members for Pricey Transmission Expansion.)

“In case no one has noticed, we’re using words like ‘urgent’ and ‘imperative,’” Moeller said of the need for new transmission to achieve clean-energy goals.

He noted Entergy is the latest MISO utility to pledge carbon neutrality by 2050.

“It’s important to understand that the whole of the footprint is making changes even though they’re not identically the same. This is going to take a team sport,” Moeller told the MISO Board of Directors.

He said planning long-range transmission is going to be about “dollar flow, not power flow,” predicting that determining new transmission’s cost allocation will be thorny.

It’s been a decade since the RTO last explored how the costs of long-term transmission projects should be shared.

The Organization of MISO States has convened a special cost-allocation committee to draw up principles on how MISO should approach sharing costs of long-term projects.

OMS has heard from staff about the MISO’s history of transmission project classification and cost allocation, from FERC Order 2003 — which standardized generator interconnection procedures —to this summer’s cost-allocation overhaul, which lowered the voltage threshold for market efficiency projects from 345 kV to 230 kV, added two new benefit metrics and eliminated a previous 20% postage stamp allocation. (See MISO Cost Allocation Plan Wins OK on 3rd Round.)

Indiana Utility Regulatory Commissioner Sarah Freeman said the OMS will be ready with suggestions on cost allocations in the first quarter of 2021.

Several regulators have asked that MISO take care to ensure that beneficiaries of new lines pay for them. Some have suggested allocating some GI upgrades to load and some backbone transmission projects to generation. Others have kicked around the prospect of allocating projects on a subregional basis because of the footprint’s hourglass geographic shape.

Staff have said the new cost-sharing method could see the RTO approving more transmission projects.

On the other hand, MISO and SPP again failed to identify any beneficial cross-border transmission projects after a fourth interregional study this year.

The grid operators have somewhat assuaged stakeholders by announcing a new joint study targeting the RTO’s GI challenges. (See MISO, SPP to Conduct Targeted Transmission Study.) The study could bring new transmission capacity and thus bring online renewable generation trapped in the RTOs’ interconnection queues. Last year also saw a turnaround in cooperation and tone between the MISO and SPP CEOs. (See MISO, SPP Heads Present Unified Front on Seams.)

Unparalleled Storm Season

The U.S. experienced 30 named tropical storms in 2020, three of which — Hurricanes Laura, Delta and Zeta — pummeled MISO’s Gulf of Mexico states.

“I hope everybody got to learn their Greek alphabet this year,” J.T. Smith, MISO’s director of operations planning, said wryly during a Markets Committee meeting in December.

August saw MISO’s first-ever load shedding orders as a result of Hurricane Laura’s landfall in Louisiana. Following landfall, the RTO declared local conservative operations for a month to support restoration efforts. (See MISO Enacts Rolling Blackouts in Laura Aftermath.)

“She took out every electrical element in her path. … We had thousands of structures down,” Smith said of the destruction. He defended MISO’s decision to shed load. “It’s something we’d do again,” he said. “We knew load was going to come offline in southwest Louisiana.”

MISO said Laura was the strongest storm to hit the Louisiana coast since 1856. The RTO’s director of grid operations, Durgesh Manjure, said the hurricane produced “drastic images of towers twisted and bent,” but Entergy acted quickly to reenergize a 500 kV line.

“This is the first time in MISO’s history that we directed a load-shed event,” Manjure told the Midwest Reliability Organization in November. “I hope this is a once-in-a-lifetime or once-in-a-career event.”

He said the storm made it clear that MISO’s market rules and pricing are not “geared” toward catastrophic weather events. He said staff are meeting with MISO South members to discuss possible changes.

The stakeholder community was already in discussions about updating MISO’s current $3,500/MWh value-of-lost load (VOLL) when the storm led to rolling blackouts in a load pocket spanning the Texas-Louisiana border. The RTO has not updated its VOLL pricing since 2009 and may file to increase it in 2021.

In all, Laura spawned about 900,000 customer outages, 6.8 GW in generation outages and 365 transmission line outages. Some of the transmission outages were not returned to service until late October.

Smith said Hurricane Delta’s Louisiana landfall in early October was just 12 miles east from Laura’s path more than a month prior. He said this time, MISO was prepared. The Category 2 storm produced about 600,000 customer outages, 2 GW in generation outages and 54 transmission line outages.

Hurricane Zeta lashed New Orleans later in October and set off 600,000 customer outages, 1 GW of generation outages and 33 transmission outages.

New Risk Regimen

MISO said “an active, record-breaking 2020 hurricane season highlights the importance” of its efforts to establish a new reliability imperative, which may include a seasonal capacity auction and using operating hours that contain heightened risk. The grid operator currently uses a single peak summer day to define loss-of-load risk. (See MISO Nearing Decision on Seasonal Capacity Auction.)

Richard Doying, executive vice president of market and grid strategy, said an ever-changing resource portfolio paired with aging thermal generation’s more frequent outages means that risk is expressing itself in winter as well as summer. He said staff may adjust resource accreditation based on how much of resources’ nameplate capacity is useful.

“We see that migration of risk,” Doying said in December. “I think our stakeholders are comfortable with the fact that the world has changed.”

Doying also said that he’d like to see more price-responsive demand in MISO’s markets and not forcing grid operators to wait for an emergency before accessing demand-response resources. He said those moves would keep MISO markets pliable.

Staff’s Dustin Grethen, a market design adviser, said that the catalyst for the resource-adequacy initiatives is that MISO went several years without maximum generation events before encountering its first in four years in 2020.

Grethen likened the proposals to a person standing on one end of the Golden Gate Bridge and looking to the other side mired in fog. He said while MISO can’t perfectly predict what will be necessary for its market, operations and planning in the long-term, it can see how to begin crossing the bridge.

Market and resource adequacy changes will be managed on MISO’s new market platform, which is being phased in over six years. The grid operator plans to incrementally swap out systems and eventually retire its legacy platform by 2023. The legacy platform relies on ‘90s-era technology and was built in an age of conventional resources, but staff determined in 2016 that it was not able to keep up with the evolving grid’s demands

MISO’s modular platform is being developed in conjunction with other ISOs/RTOs. IT Senior Director Curtis Reister said it’s a cost-conscious move that has the RTO splitting development costs with ISO-NE and PJM.

“By doing this, we can create a more standardized product and reduce the need for customization,” Reister said.

Complicating matters, MISO expects to lose about 30% of its operators through retirement over the next few years.

“Lots of baby boomers in control rooms,” Moeller observed during the board meeting in December.