By Amanda Durish Cook
Carmel, Ind. — MISO has adequate capacity to meet summer demand, though there’s a good chance the RTO will dip into its load-modifying resources, officials said at a summer readiness workshop last week.
MISO officials reported 148.8 GW of capacity to meet a projected demand of 125.9 GW, giving it an 18.2% reserve margin, well above its 15.2% requirement. Compared with last year’s summer forecast, available capacity declined by 1.5 GW, while the load forecast decreased by 1.4 GW.
Probabilities
MISO said there is a 72% probability it will need to deploy some of its 9.5 GW of load-modifying resources, but only a 10% chance it will use all of them and have to tap operating reserves.
There is a 4.3% probability that MISO will deplete operating reserves and be forced to order load shedding, Vice President of System Operations Todd Ramey said.
Ramey said that even when MISO declares a capacity emergency, 10,000 MW are still available for use. “Emergency doesn’t mean imminent load shed,” he said. Unit retirements that reduced capacity create “a new operating reality” for the RTO, he added.
MISO is close to completing its 2016 Coordinated Seasonal Assessment for summer, which identifies potential stressors to the transmission system. “For this summer, we didn’t see any outstanding issues,” MISO transmission planning engineer Carlos Bandak said. MISO’s full analysis is due by end of the month.
Gas Inventory High
Phil Van Schaack, MISO electric-gas operations coordinator, said there was a record 2,480 Bcf of natural gas in storage at the beginning of April, a 60% rise over last year’s end-of-winter inventory.
Van Schaack also noted natural gas prices in the New York Mercantile Exchange hit lows in March not seen since 1999, at $1.64/MMBtu. He said the oversupplied market, coupled with forecasts of a warmer-than-normal summer, could result in “significant power burns, longer runs and higher capacity [factors for] gas units, similar to the summer of 2012.”
Emergency Offer Floors
MISO has established new emergency offer floors to combat depressed emergency prices. Michael Robinson, the RTO’s principal adviser for market design, said depressed emergency prices occur because offer prices for emergency resources either aren’t available or are cheaper than an economic resource dispatched prior to the emergency declaration.
Now, when a maximum generation emergency warning is issued, the pricing floor is set at the highest available economic offer. After a maximum generation emergency event is declared, the pricing floor moves up to the highest available economic and emergency offer.
Hurricane Readiness
MISO has assembled a hurricane readiness team to identify inadequacies in contingency plans for MISO South, which enters the Atlantic hurricane season next month.
“We hope to focus on communication coordination limitations,” project leader Van Schaack said. “We’ve had mild hurricane seasons since the integration of MISO South. We want to make sure we are educated on how to prepare.”
