MISO last week said it bit off more than it could chew by simultaneously mounting a long-term transmission package while trying to merge interconnection upgrades with annual transmission planning.

Staff announced Wednesday during a Planning Advisory Committee (PAC) teleconference that it will table the effort to analyze network upgrades stemming from interconnection requests for economic benefits and possible cost-sharing. They said MISO would wait until the end of the year and see how the long-term transmission plan develops.

“We received feedback from stakeholders last month that it’s probably better to wait until more information of the long-range transmission plan comes at the end of the year,” Senior Manager of Economic Planning Neil Shah said. “Let’s put this issue on hold, and we will continue to monitor the progress of the long-range plan.”

Stakeholders, particularly those belonging to the environmental sector, seemed fine with the breather.

“It did seem like it was appropriate to pause work on this since there are so many moving parts that could affect [it],” Clean Grid Alliance’s Natalie McIntire said. “I don’t want to lose this issue. It may be that it gets addressed somehow with long-range transmission and its allocation.”

Shah agreed that some long-term projects may ease network upgrade costs for interconnecting generators.

Stakeholders have warned MISO that system upgrade costs for interconnection hopefuls have been snowballing in recent years because of scant transmission planning, threatening a clean energy transition. (See “Coordinated Planning Effort Continues,” MISO Planning Advisory Comm. Briefs: Sept. 23, 2020.)

Before hitting pause on the network upgrade analysis, the RTO had proposed to conduct economic evaluations of interconnection upgrades with signed interconnection agreements rated at 230 kV or above and costing at least $50,000/MW. If the upgrades demonstrated the same 1.25:1 benefit-to-cost ratio required of market efficiency projects, they would have been included as economic projects in MISO’s annual Transmission Expansion Plan (MTEP).

The Long View

While interconnection upgrade coordination took a back seat, stakeholders at the PAC were left wondering how often they’ll be apprised of MISO’s long-term transmission planning.

They asked for monthly updates on the progress of MISO’s burgeoning long-term transmission plan, the first in a decade. (See MISO Begins Longterm Tx Modeling.) The February PAC meeting did not have an agenda item on the long-term plan.

Director of Planning Jeff Webb said MISO will begin delivering regular reports to stakeholders when it has “substantive materials.” He said so far, there is little to report.

“We can give updates, but they’ll probably be brief status updates,” Webb said, adding that the RTO plans to hold a discussion on long-term planning at the March PAC.

The grid operator is currently relying on the 20-year futures scenarios developed for MTEP 21.

Todd Hillman, MISO’s senior vice president and chief customer officer, said the RTO is first focusing on Future I, which most closely resembles member utilities’ collective plans. The future assumes an 85% likelihood that utilities meet their current decarbonization plans and full certainty that their stated generation retirements and additions come to pass. The scenario will likely translate into a 60% carbon reduction in MISO from 2005 levels.

“Future I was largely developed in talking with our members and stakeholders,” Hillman said during an informational forum in January.

MISO expects to have preliminary project solutions from its Future I modeling within the next few months. Staff is also beginning long-term modeling for the more aggressive Futures II and III. Webb said he thought that any transmission projects coming out of Future I would most likely be “baseline” and serve as a foundation for other needs found using the second and third futures.

WEC Energy Group’s Chris Plante said he wasn’t sure that MISO was predicting enough storage technology in its futures. He noted utilities are increasingly turning toward storage.

The Natural Resources Defense Council said late last month that the RTO has failed to prepare for a clean-energy future through sufficient transmission planning. The nonprofit said MISO’s recent transmission planning ignored the rapid pivot to clean resources and only anticipated “incremental clean energy development over the coming decade, rather than transformational clean energy development that is anticipated by 2035 and beyond.”

“In 2020, [MISO] ignored the demand for the regional transmission necessary to transition the Midwest into a clean energy hub. This year [it] can and should do better by building regional transmission,” the NRDC’s Toba Pearlman wrote in a blog post. She said the RTO’s inaction intensified its interconnection queue backlog.

NRDC reported that 278 storage, hybrid, wind and solar projects were withdrawn at “advanced stages” in the grid operator’s interconnection queue between 2016 and October 2020.

Senior Transmission Planning Engineer Andy Witmeier said the grid operator’s current transmission planning would be inefficient without a long-term package, and without it, “the resource shift contemplated by MISO stakeholders’ goals will be difficult to achieve.”

Speaking during a cost allocation working group teleconference on Thursday, Witmeier pointed to MISO’s newest instantaneous wind peak on Dec. 23, when 20.2 GW of wind generation served almost 27% of system load. He said even more wind power was available that day but was “trapped behind transmission congestion.”

“We have to make sure we enable the delivery of that extra generation,” he said. “With an additional 4,500 MW expected to come online in the next 12 months, it is increasingly important to see how the system is currently handling production of renewable resources and [preparing] for future growth.”

Cost Allocation Decisions Loom

MISO’s cost allocation group will eventually consider a benefit measurement and cost-sharing design for the long-range transmission plan.

Witmeier said the RTO’s current market efficiency project cost allocation won’t likely capture all long-term transmission benefits.

The Organization of MISO States convened a special cost-allocation committee late last year to draw up principles on how staff should approach long-term projects’ cost sharing. The resulting principles are broad, driving home that costs should be portioned out as precisely as possible to beneficiaries and cost-causers. OMS said generation and load — including regions with decarbonization goals — can be considered beneficiaries. It also suggested MISO use subregional allocations and bundle certain transmission projects’ costs when it makes sense.

MISO Executive Director of System Planning Aubrey Johnson acknowledged there’s not much appetite among stakeholders for a footprint-wide postage stamp rate for long-term transmission.

“That camp is very small. There’s not a high likelihood of success,” he said during an OMS meeting in January.