By Amanda Durish Cook

MISO’s Steering Committee last week approved an expanded role for the Energy Storage Task Force — with the proviso that the task force doesn’t impede on discussions in other stakeholder forums.

The committee allowed the task force more authority by approving a charter that allows it to evaluate energy storage issues instead of simply identifying them for committee assignment, and to recommend approaches directly to MISO and stakeholders, without first approaching the committee. The group can also provide subject matter expertise to committees that have been assigned storage policy issues. The task force has been seeking an expanded role for a few months. (See MISO Energy Storage Group Seeks Expanded Role.)

However, Steering Committee members removed proposed charter language that would have allowed the task force to evaluate proposed storage solutions that have already been assigned to other stakeholder committees. The committee made the decision based on MISO’s two-year-old stakeholder redesign, which discourages duplicate discussion topics across stakeholder committees.

Energy Storage Task Force Chair John Fernandes, of Invenergy, said some members of the task force have become frustrated by its previous charter’s limitations on discussion.

“When the conversation veers to market structures, hands go up and they say, ‘you shalt not go there,’” he said. “The Energy Storage Task Force is getting a little punchy not being able to talk about market structures.”

Fernandes warned that if task force members continually hit limitations in discussion, they might convene privately and put together nonpublic proposals for MISO staff.

“It will go against everything you want to protect in the stakeholder process,” Fernandes told Steering Committee members.

But some on the Steering Committee said task force members should simply track storage topics in the stakeholder committees to which the Steering Committee assigned them. “I’m really not appreciating that it’s an implied threat, either black or white,” said Planning Advisory Committee Chair Cynthia Crane. She said stakeholders could simply attend other stakeholder committees rather than resorting to nonpublic meetups.

Fernandes also said the task force must be allowed to consider topics outside of the scope of FERC Order 841.

He said the order also places a “really tight fence around which storage issues” can be discussed in the organized markets. He said that’s in contrast to member companies currently developing storage for use beyond Order 841 rules.

“Really what industry is doing is out-of-scope; industry is going beyond Order 841,” Fernandes said.

Steering Committee Chair Tia Elliott said she didn’t see anything in the task force’s current charter that would preclude it from discussing matters beyond Order 841.