By Amanda Durish Cook

CARMEL, Ind. — MISO has softened a proposal to crack down on long-term outages from capacity resources, granting some wiggle room for outages taken June through August and removing a replace-or-pay requirement.

The RTO last month introduced a provisional solution that would limit extended planned outages to fewer than 90 days to qualify for participation in the Planning Resource Auction. Additionally, resources expected to be unavailable for the first 90 days of the planning year would not qualify. (See MISO to Limit Capacity Resource Extended Outages.)

Now, MISO has relaxed the proposal so that resources unavailable for 90 of the first 120 days of the planning year will be disqualified from participation. Tim Bachus, MISO capacity market administration analyst, told the Resource Adequacy Subcommittee on Wednesday that the new proposal recognizes that September is becoming more summer-like in terms of hot weather-related demand.

Bachus said the rules will apply to both full and partial outages. Had the rules been in place during the last PRA, about 254 MW would have been impacted, he added. Currently, the RTO doesn’t impose any penalties for capacity resources that take extended outages.

“We don’t have any mechanisms in place to address this, and that’s what we’re hoping to do today,” Bachus said.

MISO has also scrapped its original provision to make cleared resources on 90-day-plus planned outages replace their capacity or be penalized at its approximate $240/MW-day cost of new entry.

Bachus said that while stakeholders were generally supportive of the 90-day planned outage limit, they criticized the CONE payment penalty as too extreme.

“We realize that not all resources will be in a position to replace,” he said.

Bachus stressed that the new rule is meant to be provisional. “This proposal is really only meant to cover a year or two, and then we’ll have a more robust construct in place,” he said.