SPP stakeholders last week unanimously approved what could be the first MISO-SPP interregional transmission project, but hurdles still remain.

The Interregional Planning Stakeholder Advisory Committee’s May 3 endorsement of the 115-kV project in South Dakota matches a thumbs-up from MISO’s Planning Advisory Committee. (See MISO Stakeholders Give Go-Ahead on SD Interregional Project.) That leaves only approval from the SPP-MISO Joint Planning Committee — composed of representatives from the two RTOs — followed by an IPSAC review of a final report before the project can enter the regional review process.

The $5.2 million project would relieve congestion on a tie line shared by the Western Area Power Administration in SPP’s footprint and Xcel Energy in MISO. The project loops a Split Rock-Lawrence 115-kV circuit into Sioux Falls to relieve congestion on the Lawrence-Sioux Falls 115-kV line.

The project was the only one of seven proposals to survive a coordinated system plan study conducted by the RTOs last year. Some of the projects failed to pass muster because of a $5 million threshold for interregional projects, a metric both RTOs are open to changing. (See 1 Project Recommended for MISO-SPP Coordinated Plan.)

Much of the cost (81.48%) for the South Dakota line shifted to MISO with the recent approval of projects in its generator interconnection queue. The project has a 20-year benefit-to-cost ratio of 4.42.

Adam Bell, SPP’s interregional coordinator, told the IPSAC that the project’s cost estimate is study-level, and that a few specific outstanding details could change the final figure.

Several stakeholders raised concerns that the economic project may not address reliability issues, but Bell assured them the regional review would be “very much stakeholder-driven.”

“We used the most up-to-date power-flow models we had,” Bell said. “We ran it in every season and year and didn’t detect any reliability concerns.”

Bell also expects the final regional review to be ready for board-level action in October.

MISO, SPP Agree to M2M Improvements

SPP and MISO have reached an agreement on improvements to the market-to-market coordination process across their seam, David Kelley, SPP’s director of interregional relations, told the Seams Steering Committee last week.

Pending executive signoff, a memorandum of understanding will document the agreement, which Kelley stressed is not a “wholesale redesign.”

The RTOs’ M2M process is modeled after a similar process between MISO and PJM, and is designed to economically relieve congestion and align border prices. Under the current model, which began in March 2015, MISO has paid almost $20 million to SPP for creating congestion on the other side of the seam.

“Almost immediately, we noticed there were some issues we needed to deal with,” Kelley said. “Price convergence should be a result of effective market-to-market. You do market-to-market because the other market potentially has generation it can dispatch at a lower cost than the monitoring market.”

The MOU will target “ineffective real-time congestion management” on some of the 135 permanent M2M flowgates between the two RTOs, errors in settlement data calculations and difficulties in finding a common interpretation of certain sections of the interregional coordination process of the RTOs’ joint operating agreement.

SPP and MISO staff have developed an alternate M2M procedure in which the monitoring RTO relies on ”market flow control” (redispatching generation within its footprint to a targeted level of market flow) rather than “total flow control” (redispatching generation within its footprint to maintain total flow on the flowgate) to help address volatility and “power swings” on certain flowgates. The process is limited to instances where M2M “does not resolve, or even aggravates, reliability concerns.”

Kelley said the monitoring RTO’s control of a flowgate’s total flow works best when it has the predominant flow.

“There are situations where we experience power swings, where a renewable wind resources swings flow on a flowgate back and forth,” he said. “One way SPP has found [to mitigate power swings] is market flow control.”

Other improvements in the MOU include forming a technical committee to address issues as they arise and following a standardized process for future resettlement requests.

SPP, MISO Studying Overlapping Charges on the Seam

SPP and MISO are currently studying a year’s worth of data to analyze overlapping charges along their seam. The result, covering the period between the March 2015 open of M2M through February 2016, will be presented at a May 31 JOA meeting.

“The research could help with market-to-market,” SPP’s Gerardo Ugalde said. “We’re doing extensive analysis to ensure the interface picked is the most accurate representation of imports in and out of SPP.”

Ugalde told the seams committee that each market should charge for congestion based on the redispatch of their respective generation resources. When a host market dispatches a resource, that resource should get either a charge or a credit based on the flowgate it is affecting.

When the host market pseudo-ties out a resource, the host market will charge or credit for the congestion from the source to the interface, covering any congestion charges to export the power out of the market. The attaining balancing authority will dispatch the resource, and the resource will get either a charge or a credit based on the flowgate it is affecting.

Ugalde said MISO and PJM have proposed a solution in which the attaining market refunds the marginal congestion component (MCC) between the interface and the resource. Under that plan, the host charges the transmission customer from the resource to the host border, the attaining market charges the MCC from the resource to the attaining market load, and the attaining market then rebates the MCC from the resource to the host border.

“If you have a resource, the interface is the border,” Ugalde explained. “If you go resource-to-border, and border-to-load, you’ve minimized the amount of overlap.”

March’s M2M Bill: $3.98 Million for MISO

SPP recorded its second highest month of M2M payments from MISO, collecting $3.98 million for congested flowgates between the two RTOs in March. The month accounts for slightly more than 20% of the $19.3 million MISO has paid SPP since the two began the M2M process in March 2015.

Most of the March payment ($3.2 million) came from a congested SPP flowgate in southeastern Kansas, caused by high winds and several line outages in the area, including a 345-kV line from Neosho County, Kan., into Oklahoma. The permanent flowgate was binding for 365 hours, representing almost half the 741 hours for all binding temporary and permanent flowgates between the two RTOs.

SPP Director Wins Illinois Volunteerism Award

SPP Director Larry Altenbaumer was honored recently with a Governor’s Volunteer Service Award for his community efforts in his hometown of Decatur, Ill. The ceremony took place April 25 at Illinois’ Old State Capitol with Gov. Bruce Rauner.

Altenbaumer was honored for his leadership of Grow Decatur, a collaborative growth and development effort transforming the city through improved economic and quality of life. Through the initiative, the community identified 10 areas as imperative to the city’s resurgence and has since formed community teams to address the issues.

“I accept this award on behalf of the dozens of other Decatur community volunteers who I have had the privilege of working with over these past several years on the Grow Decatur initiative,” he said.

Altenbaumer is vice chair of SPP’s Board of Directors, on which he has served since 2005, and chairs the Finance Committee. He retired in 2004 as president of Illinois Power.