By Amanda Durish Cook

CARMEL, Ind. — MISO expects the 15-year future scenarios informing its 2019 Transmission Expansion Plan to look much like those for 2018.

“There haven’t been any significant economic and policy changes. We can tweak and refresh these [2018] futures and adapt them for MTEP 19,” MISO Planning Manager Tony Hunziker told stakeholders at a Feb. 14 Planning Advisory Committee meeting.

Hunziker said MISO planners found the Trump administration’s plan to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement on climate change will do little to disrupt the trajectory of the RTO’s renewable penetration trends.

MISO last year assembled MTEP 18 futures designed to be reused over multiple years, provided there aren’t extreme policy changes or economic shifts. The four futures include a limited fleet change future; a continued fleet change future; an accelerated fleet change future; and a future in which distributed and emerging technologies become more widely used in the footprint. (See MISO Ranks MTEP 18 Futures by Stakeholder Preference.)

As it promised, the RTO will apply an even 25% likelihood weighting to each of the four futures, effectively eliminating the weights. MISO had originally sought to apply equal weights in MTEP 18 but had to delay the plan for a year after stakeholders — especially from MISO South — insisted on having a say in deciding the futures’ likelihood. (See MISO Delays Removing MTEP Futures Weighting to 2019.)

This year, MISO projects a slight dip in load-serving entities’ demand forecasts, with the latest overall RTO forecast trending lower than forecasts prepared to inform MTEP 18. MISO now expects demand to grow at a preliminary 0.3% rate, lower than MTEP 18’s 0.5% growth rate and keeping the forecasted non-coincident peak below 136 GW through 2026. Hunziker said MISO has not yet rerun a resource forecast with the updated data.

The RTO now anticipates lower natural gas costs, predicting prices will remain below $6/MMBtu through 2033, compared with last year’s prediction of $6.50/MMBtu.

MISO also found that, compared to its MTEP 18 estimates, the capital cost of building new generation will slightly decline for all fuel types, except for coal, which increases slightly, and utility-scale solar, which decreases more dramatically from about $2,000/kW to $1,200/kW.

Forecasted coal retirements are predicted to hold steady, with MISO estimating that about 35 GW will shut down by 2032.

MISO will hold a March 20 workshop to further refine MTEP 19 futures with stakeholders. Hunziker asked for stakeholders to submit their comments about the reuse of futures and the RTO’s predictions by March 2.