By Chris O’Malley

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission last week increased its pressure on PJM and MISO to resolve their longstanding boundary disputes, saying it was considering taking action “to improve the efficiency of operations” at the RTOs’ seam.

Despite 12 years of joint meetings that have resolved some issues, the two RTOs remain locked in a standoff over issues such as interface pricing, which MISO Market Monitor David Patton says is costing consumers millions.

At a presentation during FERC’s Jan. 22 meeting, Patton asked the agency to help resolve the disputes.

On Tuesday, FERC ordered the RTOs and their market monitors to answer questions on eight unresolved issues by April 10 (AD14-3). The commission indicated it is considering its own solutions to at least two of the issues.

FERC Solutions?

On the issue of capacity deliverability, the commission told the RTOs to identify “any reliability problems associated with modeling capacity in each RTO as a single product across the two markets.”

FERC also required the RTOs to report on what they “would need to do to implement day-ahead market coordination.”

At Thursday’s Board of Directors meeting, MISO Director Michael Curran said he was surprised by FERC’s action. “Are we moving into a phase where if we don’t fix it, [FERC will] fix it for us?” he asked .

The commission ordered the RTOs to report on proposed solutions, obstacles to solutions, and a timeline for overcoming them and making filings at the commission on the issues of:

• Interface pricing
• Capacity deliverability
• Day-ahead market coordination
• Firm-flow entitlement freeze date
• Use of commercial flow in the market-to-market process
• Modeling of the Ontario/Michigan phase angle regulators for congestion management

Room for Improvement

The commission noted the RTOs’ progress in areas such as RTO-to-RTO data exchanges and financial transmission rights market coordination. It also acknowledged that the RTOs are moving to improve interchange optimization through coordinated transaction scheduling. (See related story, PJM MRC/MC Briefs.)

In December, the commission ordered a technical conference on Northern Indiana Public Service Co.’s complaint over the interregional transmission planning provisions in the RTOs’ joint operating agreement (EL13-88). NIPSCO, a MISO member that is flanked by PJM in eastern Indiana and Illinois to its west, complained that the MISO-PJM seam is highly congested and that the RTOs have not approved a single cross-border transmission upgrade project under the JOA.

The commission also said the RTOs have completed a coordinated study on deliverability despite their differing modeling approaches. The study concluded that “more than 96% of MISO and PJM units are jointly deliverable to the aggregate MISO and PJM load footprint and [that] the total transmission capability between the two systems is quite significant.”

The RTOs found that the transmission capacity in the MISO-to-PJM direction is fully subscribed, while capability in the PJM-to-MISO direction is “minimally utilized for capacity.”

“Therefore, there could be benefit in the PJM-to-MISO direction, even in the near-term,” the commission said.

FERC ordered the RTOs and their market monitors to respond to the commission’s questions within 45 days with reply comments from stakeholders due April 27.

Interface Pricing

PJM and MISO have been working for two years to resolve differences in the way they price transactions at interface buses. Patton told FERC in January that transactions are overcompensated when expected to relieve a constraint and overcharged when expected to contribute to congestion. (See Patton Asks FERC to Set Deadline on PJM-MISO Interface Pricing Dispute.)

The RTOs agree that current methods are inaccurate because they both model the same constraints, resulting in double-counting. But they have been unable to agree on a solution.

Bowring told the commission that there will continue to be issues between the RTOs “as long as there are very substantial differences between the design for procuring capacity in MISO and the design for procuring capacity in PJM.”