By Amanda Durish Cook

CARMEL, Ind. — The MISO Board of Directors’ Markets Committee agreed to fund the RTO’s share of its seams coordination analysis with SPP and received a briefing on FERC’s call for cold weather reliability standards Thursday.

During a conference call meeting, the committee unanimously approved MISO’s request to pay Potomac Economics $250,000 for its work on the seams project, which the monitoring firm will conduct with the SPP Market Monitoring Unit. The joint analysis will seek to identify issues that may be preventing the RTOs from reaching agreement on an interregional transmission project. (See RSC, OMS Approve Monitors’ Seams Study.)

The first phase of the study — requested by the Organization of MISO States and SPP’s Regional State Committee — will wrap up by the end of 2019.

MISO Independent Market Monitor David Patton told board members he was fairly certain study costs would not exceed $250,000.

“It’s a lot of work, but we’ve taken the time to map out what we’re going to be doing. We have a high degree of confidence” costs will stay within the quarter-million dollars, Patton said.

The study has the potential to become a springboard for several past unaddressed State of the Market recommendations, he said.

“If you remember my recommendations, a lot of them are labeled ‘externally dependent,’ meaning MISO needs cooperation with an outside RTO. I view this as a way to facilitate consensus on [MISO-SPP] issues that have been around for a while,” he said.

Patton also said he expects the report will detail recommendations for MISO and SPP, with descriptions of benefits. It’s also possible that Patton and the SPP MMU may disagree on recommendations, OMS President Daniel Hall said.

“I want to commend the seams committee and OMS and the RSC for bringing up these issues,” Director Trip Doggett said. “This is very timely.”

Cold Snap Revisit

The committee also heard MISO’s perspective on last month’s FERC/NERC report on the arctic front that traveled through MISO South and SPP in January 2018. (See FERC Calls for Cold Weather Reliability Standard.)

MISO Executive Director of System Operations Renuka Chatterjee said a number of challenging conditions, including generator outages, a missed weather forecast and record-shattering load — not just MISO’s Midwest-South transfer flow limit — contributed to the winter emergency.

In prior meetings, MISO staff called the report fair and deemed the recommendations sensible, though they said MISO was still reviewing them. (See “MISO Says Winter Standards Reasonable,” MISO Reliability Subcommittee Briefs: Aug. 1, 2019.)

“When you have a significant event that the temperatures are so far below normal … it becomes the new standard,” Chatterjee said. She said the event, like 2014’s polar vortex, will be used as lessons learned and a new example of extreme operating conditions in planning.

MISO President Clair Moeller said the RTO will pay more attention to “localized weather events” in load forecasting in the future.

“Having lived through the 2011 ERCOT event, I would say these conditions were exactly what we experienced,” said Dogget, a former ERCOT CEO.

Doggett urged MISO to work with its southern generation owners to make sure equipment is winterized. But he also commended MISO operators on their communication during the event.

MISO will hold a winter readiness workshop with its stakeholders in October. The RTO is also circulating a winterization survey through Sept. 15 among its generation owners to get a better idea of cold weather preparations.