Energy consumption in MISO was nearly normal last month as the pandemic rounded into its second year, an RTO official said last week.
Speaking at an April 20 Informational Forum, Director of Reliability Coordination Jessica Lucas said MISO is experiencing “minimal” COVID-19 impacts on load and that demand is essentially back to normal.
But she said the pandemic has rendered 2020 a poor reference point for load forecasting.
Because load was down a year ago due to multiple public lockdown orders, MISO’s year-over-year comparisons aren’t reliable and resulted in some under-forecasting of day-ahead load in March, she said.
March’s cold start drove an 83.3-GW peak load, though the rest of the month was warmer than normal.
March load peaked at a mere 80 GW last year, but 98 GW in 2019.
Real-time energy prices also rebounded to an average of $24.07/MWh during the month, with day-ahead prices closely tracking at $23.69. Last March, real-time prices dipped to an average of $18/MWh.
The grid operator also set a new record on March 30 when wind generation served 20.7 GW, or 29%, of total system load.
So far this year, MISO has completed one generator interconnection agreement, while 91 projects have withdrawn from the interconnection queue. MISO will open one queue cycle this year; project hopefuls have until July 22 to apply to enter.
MISO’s interconnection queue stands at 557 projects totaling 83.3 GW. Historically, only about 20% of projects that enter the queue ever connect to the system.
