By Amanda Durish Cook

Concerned about the impact of plant retirements in the state, Michigan officials have asked MISO to conduct a reliability analysis that assumes simultaneous outages at the Palisades and Fermi 2 nuclear plants.

Entergy’s Palisades plant on Lake Michigan and DTE Energy’s Fermi 2 on Lake Erie — both in MISO’s Zone 7 — are capable of generating a combined 1,855 MW.

In a letter to MISO, Michigan Public Service Commission Chairwoman Sally Talberg and Valerie Brader, executive director of the Michigan Agency for Energy, said they wanted to understand what would happen in the summer of 2018 if Michigan experienced another event like it did in the summer of 2012 when the two nuclear plants were out of service while MISO was under a hot weather alert.

MISO spokesperson Andy Schonert said the RTO was reviewing the request.

The state officials said it was “crucial” for Michigan to know its vulnerabilities and whether it still could ensure reliability. They asked MISO to assess the zone’s internal generating capacity and available contracted capacity as well as how much generation could be imported from outside the state.

“We did not pick this scenario randomly,” Brader said. “In the summer of 2012, we had outages at two nuclear facilities while MISO was under a hot weather alert.  Despite those outages, we were able to keep the lights on. Now we have a lot fewer plants operating.  We want to know if the lights would stay on if we had the same thing happen in the summer of 2018.”

Talberg said the assessment would be “a valuable tool” for future PSC planning. She noted Michigan already relies on out-of-state imports to meet its reliability requirements.

The Michigan PSC’s five-year outlook through 2020 predicts “reliability challenges during periods of peak demand in the 2017-2018 timeframe” in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula.