By Amanda Durish Cook
MISO last week filed revised Tariff language allowing it to recover costs for multi-value transmission projects that benefit PJM customers by charging a fee on exports to PJM (ER10-1791-003). The Aug. 12 compliance filing requested the new language be retroactive to July 13, 2016.
Last month, FERC partially lifted the three-year-old restriction on MVP allocations for exports in response to a 2013 remand from the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. (See FERC Looks Again at Export Pricing for MISO MVPs.)
The commission said it was persuaded by the large-scale wind buildout “capable of serving both MISO’s and its neighbors’ energy policy requirements.”
It also cited “the reported need of PJM entities to access those resources; and the reported need for MISO to build new transmission facilities to deliver the output of those resources within MISO for export.”
“Given these changes, it is appropriate to allow MISO to assess the MVP usage charge for transmission service used to export to PJM just as MISO assesses the MVP usage charge for transmission service used to export energy to other regions,” FERC concluded.
MISO created the MVP category six years ago for projects that address more than one reliability or economic need across multiple transmission zones. The RTO originally intended to allocate project costs to all of its load and exports, but FERC excluded the export charge because of concerns over rate pancaking.
Chris Miller, FERC’s liaison to MISO, said the RTO removed Tariff language that had prohibited it from charging exports. Affected portions include Attachment MM, Schedule 26-A, Schedule 39 and Attachment L.
MISO also made an informational filing in early August detailing multi-value, market efficiency and baseline reliability projects approved during the Transmission Expansion Plans in 2014 and 2015 (ER13-186, ER13-187). While 140 baseline reliability projects were approved in the two years, only one market efficiency project was greenlit.
The RTO did not approve any MVPs in 2014 or 2015. It said its $6 billion 2011 MVP portfolio — 17 projects in various transmissions zones over nine states — left only local reliability projects to be addressed for the time being.
Three of the projects are in service, with the remainder scheduled to be operational in three to five years.
