By Amanda Durish Cook

MISO and SPP last week agreed to file changes to their joint operating agreement that they say will smooth the approval of interregional projects.

The changes, to be filed at FERC early next year, will eliminate the $5 million cost threshold for the projects, add avoided costs and adjusted production cost benefits to project evaluation, and remove the joint modeling requirement in favor of individual RTO regional analyses. The RTOs will also increase the regularity with which they produce a coordinated system plan (CSP), the joint study used to identify interregional transmission needs. (See MISO, SPP Loosen Interregional Project Requirements.)

The JOA revisions will not lower a 345-kV voltage requirement mandated by MISO, though the RTOs last month said they might create a category of smaller interregional transmission projects without voltage requirements. (See MISO, SPP Mulling Small Interregional Project Type.)

The RTOs earlier this year said the criteria currently spelled out in JOA might be preventing beneficial interregional projects from gaining approval.

“I think SPP and MISO are on the same page on these JOA changes,” SPP Interregional Coordinator Adam Bell said during a Nov. 9 Interregional Stakeholder Planning Advisory Committee conference call.

However, Bell said the revisions won’t be considered final until they’re reviewed by both RTO legal teams. He said the RTOs hope to file the changes in February and will likely hold another conference call with stakeholders before then.

But Entergy’s Jennifer Amerkhail said the JOA revisions lack the FERC Order 1000 safeguards requiring transmission developers to first propose projects to RTOs jointly before they are evaluated in each individual regional process. She said it was important for interested parties to review projects, especially because relaxed cost requirements will result in a higher number of proposed interregional projects. Amerkhail promised to provide SPP and MISO with proposed redlines so that a joint review is clearly stated as a first step before projects are put to regional review.

RTO staff said the regional analysis design will be a more efficient process than building a joint model, and other stakeholders pointed out that MISO and SPP have never approved an interregional transmission project.

“It’s not like the world is running amuck and there’s thousands of interregional projects getting proposed,” LS Power’s Pat Hayes said.

The revisions also prescribe that the CSP will take place annually automatically unless staff from either RTO vote to skip a year. The new rules require the CSP be developed no less than once every three years. The JOA currently stipulates that CSPs are produced only when either MISO or SPP staff raise the issue and then both agree to a plan.

“It moves the default from not doing a study to doing a study,” Bell said.

SPP and MISO still have at least one JOA revision to iron out: whether to include negative adjusted production costs (APC) in the evaluation of reliability interregional projects as well as economic projects.

The JOA currently requires that negative APC not be considered in the cost allocation of interregional reliability projects. Each RTO calculates APC using its own regional models.

MISO Planning Adviser Davey Lopez said MISO believes the most equitable cost allocation would include the impacts of negative APC. SPP, however, only commits to supporting “continued stakeholder discussion on whether or not negative APC values should be considered.” Bell said by including negative APC, the RTOs might find themselves in a situation where the JOA won’t allow them to pursue an otherwise beneficial reliability project for both regions.

Bell asked stakeholders to submit their opinions on negative APC to SPP. Some stakeholders at the meeting said excluding negative APC from an interregional reliability project assessment results in a biased and less transparent project evaluation.

M2M Payments Again in MISO’s Favor

MISO recorded its third straight month of market-to-market (M2M) payments from SPP in September, with the latter sending the former slightly more than $165,000.

The total, less than a quarter of what SPP sent MISO the month before, reduced the amount of M2M payments SPP has accumulated to $51.2 million since the two RTOs began the M2M process in March 2015.

Temporary flowgates were binding for 519 hours in September, resulting in $1.2 million in M2M payments to MISO. That was almost entirely negated by $1.1 million for permanent flowgates binding for 110 hours in SPP’s favor.

Tom Kleckner contributed to this report.