By Amanda Durish Cook

CARMEL, Ind. — MISO’s Market Roadmap projects have been rearranged following stakeholder complaints over the lack of transparency behind the RTO’s reasoning for how it ranked them.

Stakeholders first raised their concerns over the rankings, and how MISO’s ordering was merged with stakeholders’ classification preferences, during the August Market Subcommittee meeting. The projects in the Market Roadmap, a work plan for market issues, were originally supposed to be ranked by early August.

“There were obviously some differences between what MISO and its stakeholders thought were priorities,” said Mia Adams, a senior market strategy analyst. Now, the four high-priority Market Roadmap projects are:

• Aggregating load to meet minimum participation limits, which was previously ranked as a low priority by MISO;
• Automatic generation control enhancement for fast-ramping resources, which was ranked high priority by stakeholders; MISO revised the priority from “low” in June to “high” in a second draft of the work plan in August;
• Behind-the-meter storage aggregation under Type II demand response resources, which MISO previously gave a low priority; and
• Introduction of multiday financial commitments, voted high priority by both MISO staff and stakeholders.

With the reorder, MISO’s goals of developing additional short-term capacity reserve requirements and incorporating DR, emergency DR and boiler-turbine-generator deployment during capacity emergencies moved from high to medium priority. In addition, a pricing structure for voltage and local reliability commitments moved to low priority despite solid accord for a medium-priority ranking from the RTO and stakeholders.

The reorder provoked little discussion, as MISO almost completely aligned its prioritization with the stakeholders’ opinions.

MISO’s power marketers sector advocated that a virtual spread product be given high priority, but Adams said the RTO would need technological upgrades before it could complete the project. The issue was ranked low priority.

Of the 17 issues identified in the Market Roadmap process at the beginning of the year, five — including coordinated transaction scheduling with SPP — were placed in “parking lot” status, meaning they aren’t going to be given attention anytime soon.

MISO will unveil the final project prioritization in December.