CARMEL, Ind. — MISO’s long-term project to replace its market platform is now getting down to specifics, stakeholders learned last week.

RTO technical staff are currently devoting time to creating a better market user interface — the nonpublic webpages MISO uses to accept energy bids and offers, MISO Senior IT Director Curtis Reister told the Market Subcommittee on Thursday.

The new interface is expected to work with Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Chrome and Firefox. Reister said MISO sometimes forces users to use older versions of browsers for combability with the old interface.

He could provide no release date for stakeholders to peak at the new interface but said the RTO would keep them updated on progress.

MISO CEO John Bear last month said he expects about 200 employees to spend 100,000 hours total on the platform replacement project.

Final Uninstructed Deviation Proposal

MISO’s final proposal for dealing with generators’ uninstructed deviations from dispatch instructions appears to strike a balance between the views of RTO staff and stakeholders.

The plan calculates a generator’s uninstructed deviation by comparing the time-weighted average of its real-time ramp rate with its day-ahead offered ramp rate, while allowing for a 12% tolerance from set point instructions.

The proposal eliminates the RTO’s current “all or nothing” eligibility for make-whole payments, instead allowing generators to collect full payments when they respond to dispatch instructions at a rate of 80% or higher over an hour, while excluding payouts when performance rates fall below 20%. Units operating between those two thresholds would earn make-whole payments in proportion to performance. (See Monitor Backs MISO Uninstructed Deviation Proposal.)

The change would mean that a generator that fails four or more consecutive five-minute dispatch intervals within an hour by either providing excessive or deficient energy will not automatically lose its eligibility for make-whole payments.

In response to the concerns of some stakeholders that wind and solar resources would be flagged for producing excessive energy, MISO crafted an exception to its uninstructed deviation proposal. MISO Market Quality Manager Jason Howard said the RTO only plans to assess excessive or deficient energy charges on dispatchable intermittent resources during intervals when the resources are economically dispatched below the RTO’s forecast. Dispatchable intermittent resources that use their own forecasts will be charged for excessive or deficient energy like any other resource under the proposal.

Howard said the move could help eliminate any intentional under- or over-forecasting by intermittent resources in order to collect make-whole payments, an issue the Independent Market Monitor has repeatedly raised.

“I don’t think that we’re done here. We’re going to have other discussions about forecasting and intermittent resources,” Howard said.

MISO now plans to file with FERC to reflect the change by the third quarter of this year, with the new uninstructed deviation calculation in place by early 2019.

Multiple stakeholders thanked MISO staff for taking extra time to develop a compromise proposal.

— Amanda Durish Cook