By Amanda Durish Cook

The Organization of MISO States last week issued a set of principles intended to guide the RTO’s approach to long-term transmission planning.

The release of the document comes as MISO and its stakeholders are debating whether the RTO should launch a second regional transmission package similar to 2011’s multi-value project (MVP) portfolio. (See MISO Stakeholders: New Blueprint Needed for Tx Planning.)

“Considering the timeline associated with infrastructure planning and development, it’s important to get started now to ensure the grid we need in the future will be there to maintain reliability and support the evolving resource mix,” Minnesota Public Utilities Commissioner and OMS Vice President Matt Schuerger said in a statement.

OMS approved the eight basic principles in mid-June as part of a position statement, with support from 12 of its 17 regulator members.

Among the precepts laid out in the document, OMS states that MISO’s long-term planning must account for the changing resource mix based on “robust input from the states.” The group also wants the RTO to consider reliability requirements when planning transmission and to test transmission proposals “under a variety of system conditions and scenarios.”

OMS also asked for an exhaustive and transparent stakeholder process should MISO develop a new cost allocation for a long-term plan. It also said the RTO should move quickly to assess system needs if it’s planning on a new long-term transmission package “given the long time frames expected for infrastructure planning and development.”

Other principles for MISO to follow include:

• Producing cost-effective solutions to “known physical and contractual system constraints.” Here, OMS specifically called out the MISO Midwest-to-South regional transfer limit.
• Evaluating multiple transmission and non-transmission alternatives on a “level playing field.”
• Publishing the cost impacts to subregions, including the costs of both moving ahead with or delaying transmission plans.
• Ensuring that any state in the MISO footprint is not negatively impacted by a long-term transmission plan.

MISO executives at the Board Week meetings in June said the region must invest significantly in transmission investment to accommodate all the projects in the current 100-GW interconnection queue; however, RTO staff also expect several unprepared generation projects to drop out.

Opposition

Two MISO South states and the city of New Orleans came out in opposition to the principles, calling them “vague and overly broad” and lacking a “clear goal.”

“No one has demonstrated that these changes are needed or that MISO’s current long-range transmission planning process is unjust or unreasonable,” the Louisiana Public Service Commission, the Mississippi Public Service Commission and the New Orleans City Council wrote in a minority dissent.

They also said the principles won’t provide additional guidance because MISO already employs such principles in its long-term transmission planning.

“These principles are unnecessary and open to endless interpretation. To the extent MISO’s existing long-range transmission planning processes are unable to address a specific planning goal or object, interested stakeholders should raise those concerns within the MISO stakeholder process,” the opponents said.

The Illinois Commerce Commission chose not to take a stance on the document, and the Manitoba Public Utilities Board did not participate in crafting the principles.

At an Advisory Committee meeting June 19, Schuerger said the “common sense” principals were settled on after many months and the document represented “broad support” for “key positions and policies.”

“It was not a unanimous vote; not everyone agreed,” Schuerger said, but he noted that most states came together in agreement.

“We are working continually to bring all of our states together,” he added.

Study Scoped for MISO-SPP Seams

In a separate development related to transmission planning, Independent Market Monitor David Patton last week revealed the scope of the joint analysis on seams issues requested by OMS and the SPP Regional State Committee. (See RSC, OMS Approve Monitors’ Seams Study.) Patton called MISO-SPP market-to-market coordination was his “No. 1 priority.”

The study scope focuses on eight areas for improvement: market‐to‐market coordination; possible creation of targeted market efficiency projects like those between MISO and PJM; more efficient interface pricing; optimization of interchange transactions across the RTOs’ interface; better management of the regional directional transfer limit; outage scheduling and day‐ahead coordination; elimination of rate pancaking; and possible joint dispatch.

“Some of these issues we’ve raised in our reports, and some the SPP Monitor has raised,” Patton said during a call hosted by the Board of Directors’ Markets Committee on Wednesday.

Patton said he thought analyses on rate pancaking and joint dispatch would be the least beneficial, the former because it would not reduce production costs, and the latter because it might require some merging of the RTOs.

“That one confuses me,” he said of joint dispatch.

Patton said the RTOs could see more economic benefits from optimizing their interchanges and better coordinating their market-to-market process. But overall, he praised the work between the MISO and SPP states.

“I actually think there are some issues on here where the states can help the RTOs come to a consensus, an agreement,” Patton said.

He said the goal is to complete the analyses before 2020. MISO executives said they may have to adjust their 2019 budget in order to compensate the Monitor and his staff for the extra work. Patton said he would come up with a statement of work soon.

The Markets Committee also addressed the study in closed session immediately following the meeting.