INDIANAPOLIS — MISO’s Board of Directors will remain unchanged heading into 2020 after the same chairman and three incumbent directors were elected to retain their positions at last week’s final Board Week of the year.

RTO members voted for Todd Raba, Trip Doggett and Barbara Krumsiek to remain on the board through the end of 2022. (See MISO Board of Directors Briefs: Sept. 18, 2019.)

Reporting results at the board’s meeting Thursday, MISO General Counsel Andre Porter said of 146 eligible voting members, 84 cast votes, easily passing the 25% voting participation quorum. Voting was held Sept. 1 through Nov. 26.

This year, the board also filled exiting Director Thomas Rainwater’s vacant seat with former New York Power Authority CFO Robert Lurie, who appeared at Board Week.

The meeting also saw directors vote unanimously to re-elect Phyllis Currie to a second year as their chairman.

“I tell a lot of my California colleagues that they could learn a lot by how MISO engages with stakeholders,” Currie said, accepting the position.

She opened the meeting by reminding staff and members of the RTO’s compliance hotline, where individuals can privately report suspected unlawful, unethical or inappropriate behavior.

In the latter half of 2020, MISO will hold a nomination and election to replace Director Baljit Dail, who has already exceeded his three-term limit; the Nominating Committee in 2017 waived his limit and allowed him to stand for an additional term. At the time, the committee cited MISO’s multiple new directors and Dail’s much-needed information technological experience as the reason for the waiver. (See “Committee Permits Consideration of Extra Term for Dail,” MISO BoD Briefs: June 22, 2017.)

Private Cloud Prepped for New Market Platform

MISO is wrapping up the third year of a seven-year effort to replace its market platform, this year establishing a private cloud-based server that will host the new platform’s modular server.

“We continue to accept market deliverables and find them acceptable,” Senior Director of Market System Enhancements Kevin Sherd told directors at a Dec. 10 meeting of the board’s Technology Committee.

Chief Information Security Officer Keri Glitch said MISO is still running two environments while it learns and discovers efficiencies in the cloud.

MISO will have spent about $20 million on the platform replacement this year, about $500,000 below budget because of a later-than-expected FERC order regarding the RTO’s inclusion of energy storage resources in its market. (See Storage Plans Clear FERC with Conditions.)

The RTO next year plans to make the cloud operational and test it using non-critical infrastructure protection data. By year’s end it will test the new market user interface with customers and begin uploading operations model data into its model manager, which is designed to be a singular repository for its many planning models.

The tasks are the major highlights of MISO’s 2020 to-do list. Vice President of Market System Enhancements Todd Ramey has said the RTO has about 200 deliverables it must complete over the year as part of the project.

“Two-thirds of the work is still in front of us,” said Ramey, who also reassured board members that MISO is “encouraged” by main vendor General Electric’s recent performance.

“We’re trying to be cautious and not too optimistic because … a lot of challenges lay before us,” he added.

MISO expects to introduce its new day-ahead market clearing engine on the private cloud in 2022.

Meanwhile, the RTO reported that it blocked 8.1 billion connections into its systems year-to-date in 2019, a 54% increase from last year. It also reported it had a 2.15% average click rate on phishing attempts in 2019, below the 5.3% industry average.

Glitch also said that over Aug. 22-26, MISO’s energy management system (EMS) experienced multiple slowdowns while trying to access its network-attached storage. “File transfer between EMS and market systems was interrupted during these slowdowns,” Glitch reported.

Glitch said that while MISO largely cleared up the problem, smaller, infrequent slowdowns persist. She said a small, dedicated team is working to identify the root cause of the problem.

MISO Slightly Overbudget in 2019

MISO expects to spend nearly $274 million in base operating expenses by year-end, exceeding its 2019 budget by about $1.3 million (0.5%).

CFO Melissa Brown said the overage is the result of MISO reclassifying some capital expenses as operating expenses.

MISO’s capital spending will likely reach $23.6 million, underbudget by $600,000 (2.7%).

The RTO has set a $337.6 million total operating budget and a $30.4 million capital expense budget for 2020.

MISO: We’re Going to Disney World!

MISO will break with tradition in 2020, holding its final Board Week of the year outside the footprint in Orlando, Fla., instead of near its headquarters in central Indiana.

MISO released a schedule of 2020 quarterly board meeting dates:

• March 24-26 in New Orleans;
• June 16-18 in Milwaukee;
• Sept. 15-17 in St. Paul, Minn.; and
• Dec. 8-10 in Orlando.

— Amanda Durish Cook