MISO’s Transmission Planning Business Practice Manual 020, which controls the expedited review process and replaces the current out-of-cycle reviews, is nearly complete, Matthew Tackett, a MISO principal adviser, told the Planning Subcommittee last week.
“In October, we approached the PSC with changes, and they were significant, with a complete rewrite of the bottom-up planning,” Tackett said during a presentation. The process change would take into account both near-term reliability planning implications, which MISO refers to as “bottom-up” planning, and long-term economic planning implications, which MISO calls “top-down” planning.
Tackett said the new BPM 020 language eliminates the cost allocation of baseline reliability projects under FERC Order 1000. His update to the subcommittee followed stakeholders’ comments on a second draft of the manual, which was circulated in December.
“We agreed that since the changes were fairly widespread, stakeholders should comment. We think we’ve got the draft BPM down pretty well … and we’ve got pretty good consensus,” Tackett said. (See “MISO Adds Conditions for Stakeholder Notification and Advice into Expedited Review Process,” MISO Planning Advisory Committee Briefs.)
MISO made minor editorial fixes and accepted one request from stakeholders while declining a pair of others. The RTO agreed to the Transmission Owner sector’s proposal to include a reference in the BPM to TOs’ local transmission planning criteria.
But MISO rejected a suggestion that it remove the “redundant” practice of planning for maintenance outages and a NERC category P1 contingency (controlled interruption of electric supply to local network customers connected to or supplied by the faulted element). The RTO said it “continues to believe it is important to plan for maintenance outages in off-peak planning cases to ensure the system is designed with sufficient flexibility and robustness to provide options to outage coordination for allowing for planned maintenance.”
“It’s important that we plan the system with enough flexibility so we don’t tie [transmission owners’] hands,” Tackett said. “The bottom line is we need to make sure the system is planned to incorporate maintenance, but we also need to plan for contingencies.”
MISO also declined a suggestion that it specify a default measure to determine when a generator pulls out of synchronism. The RTO said that it would leave stability criteria up to individual TOs. “We don’t think we need that as default criteria because individual transmission owners have their own criteria, and we’ll respect that,” Tackett said.
MISO will present the final version of the language to the Planning Advisory Committee in March and ask for written feedback. Tackett said the goal is to incorporate all of the proposed changes by late spring during the annual review of BPM 020. MISO’s Senior Manager of Transmission Expansion Planning Thompson Adu said the RTO is targeting a May 8 deadline for completing revisions to all BPMs currently under review.
MISO: More Time Needed to Refine Non-Transmission Alternatives Process
MISO planners will take another month to work on a rewrite of their non-transmission alternatives process.
“There are lots of different issues we need to work through, and those would really impact MISO’s internal work processes. There were lots of good issues raised, and we need a bit more time with this,” Tackett said. The RTO would also have to incorporate NERC standards for transmission planning compliance, he said.
MISO is considering the use of an optimization tool to evaluate non-transmission alternatives and using modeling to determine if a non-transmission option is viable for an identified transmission need. Tackett said he preferred an approach that puts reliability first.
Tackett said there was sufficient time to go over the non-transmission process because it would be implemented in a subsequent planning cycle, most likely the 2017 Transmission Expansion Plan.
“When you think you have a lot of time, the clock tends to start ticking very fast, so we want to keep moving on this, but do our due diligence,” Tackett said.
He said his goal was to return with a presentation at the April Planning Subcommittee meeting. In the meantime, he asked for more stakeholder comments by March 15.
MISO to Bring Minimum Design Requirements Task Team Out of Retirement
MISO will reconvene its Minimum Design Requirements Task Team in March to modify standards for competitive transmission projects under BPM 029. Tackett said the RTO will extend the task team through the end of next year. According to MISO, the task team may introduce a second version of the BPM in time for the next planning cycle. MISO completed the latest round of revisions to BPM 029 last month.
— Amanda Durish Cook
