MISO has aligned its Business Practices Manuals with interconnection queue improvements approved by FERC at the beginning of the year (ER17-156). (See FERC Accepts MISO’s 2nd Try on Queue Reform.)

Paul Muncy, of MISO’s transmission access planning division, told the Planning Advisory Committee last week that BPM 015 mirrors the RTO’s queue filing and is nearly complete, with final review expected over the next few weeks. Language was crafted by the Interconnection Process Task Force (IPTF), which was due to sunset in July but will now continue through December after a unanimous sector vote to extend the group’s existence by six months.

Muncy also said MISO will create a separate process for a few HVDC projects currently in the queue’s system planning and analysis phase. The RTO has already filed to immediately move those projects out of the queue and put them in a holding pattern (ER17-1793). Muncy said a filing on the new process will be ready by the end of this year.

The Merchant HVDC Task Team will work on the separate HVDC filing, stakeholder sectors decided in a vote at the meeting. Muncy said the team began work on Tariff language, but the RTO prefers to transfer that job to the IPTF, which makes recommendations involving interconnection queue revisions. During a sector vote at the PAC meeting, the Coordinating, Transmission Owners and Environmental sectors voted to keep the assignment in the task team, with only the Transmission-Dependent Utilities sector voting in favor of an IPTF handoff. The State Regulatory, Power Marketers and End Users sectors abstained from voting.

MISO Moves Toward Singular Attachment Y Status

MISO plans by the end of the year to introduce Tariff changes eliminating resource suspensions in favor of a single retirement process that would allow a potentially retiring resource to retain the ability to participate in an upcoming capacity auction.

The RTO proposes to reduce its Attachment Y process to a catch-all “economic shutdown” status that no longer recognizes temporary suspensions or require resource owners to provide return dates. Owners could reverse a retirement decision over a full planning year and participate in an upcoming Planning Resource Auction. The same yearlong rescission period will apply to system support resources whose status has been lifted by MISO. (See “Removal of Temporary Suspensions will Provide Generators Flexibility, RTO says,” MISO Planning Advisory Committee Briefs.)

“We don’t need to have a separate process for handling suspensions,” MISO adviser Joe Reddoch said.

MISO will add a provision allowing it to terminate interconnection service for units that have been on extended outage for more than 36 months, he said. “This allows us to dispose of models in our planning studies that are inoperable but show up as available. This way we get rid of the hoarding of interconnection service.”

An additional provision would permit an asset owner to waive its right to rescind a retirement decision and progress directly to retirement. Reddoch said some resource owners might be ready to make a binding decision by the time they file an Attachment Y request.

Reddoch said the proposal’s largest point of contention is the removal of confidentiality for results of Attachment Y reliability studies. By the time confidentiality is lifted, generator owners would on average be three months away from retirement and would have likely made a public announcement, he said.

MISO said it is not “seeking to assume the responsibility or to pre-empt the owner’s announcement of a generator retirement, but Attachment Y is late enough in the process for the owner to have made preparations for the decommissioning process.”

“We feel that it’s so late in the game, we don’t see it as detrimental to the asset owner,” Reddoch said.

PAC OKs Competitive Transmission Task Team Extension

PAC sectors approved a six-month extension of MISO’s Competitive Transmission Task Team.

Brian Pedersen, manager of competitive transmission, sought the extension to enable the group to continue identifying improvements to the RTO’s competitive project selection process in preparation for a future Tariff filing. The team was created after MISO selected LS Power to develop the Duff-Coleman 345-kV transmission project in December. (See Texas Law Could Affect MISO Competitive Transmission.)

“We want to make sure proposals take less time and money to evaluate,” Pedersen said.

The PAC allowed the extension by consent. Chair Cynthia Crane will report the extension at a July 26 meeting of the Steering Committee, which could ask why the group has not completed its original mission in the usual six-month time frame allotted to task teams.

MISO Extends Scoping for Long-Term Overlay Study

MISO will spend more time scoping its long-term overlay study, extending analyses into the first quarter of 2018 in order to better assess system needs.

MISO’s Lynn Hecker said the RTO needs more time to analyze system drivers of resilience and reliability 20 years into the future and discuss how the study will differ from annual Transmission Expansion Plan studies. In April, MISO released a preliminary overlay map of transmission needs that might be considered. (See MISO Planners Looking at 3 La. Projects, Overlay ‘Skeleton’.)

MISO canceled its next Economic Planning Users Group on July 27, where a discussion of the study was planned. Hecker said the RTO will plan a November special workshop to discuss scoping with stakeholders.

The extra quarter dedicated to analysis is not expected to alter the overall study timeline at this point, Hecker said. Projects resulting from the long-term overlay are not expected until the third quarter of 2018, with business cases discussed throughout 2019 before a targeted end-of-year approval on projects that make the cut.

Expedited Project Requests Move to MTEP 17

MISO is recommending that three expedited projects valued at $16.3 million advance to the 2017 Transmission Expansion Plan. Three other project requests are still under consideration.

Two southern Louisiana projects were recommended for MTEP 17 inclusion after reliability studies. Thompson Adu, senior manager of transmission expansion planning, said Entergy’s new $1.3 million Roux Substation and transformer upgrade will proceed, along with the company’s new $11.3 million Lyle Substation and associated rebuild of a 10-mile, 69-kV circuit.

MISO is also recommending ITC Holdings’ proposed $3.7 million, 120-kV Zephyr Substation and circuit in southeastern Michigan after determining the project will have no adverse reliability impacts.

The RTO is still assessing two substation projects in Iowa, Adu said. If approved, ITC would construct the $3.2 million Van Allen 69/12.5-kV and $2.2 million 69/25-kV West Okoboji Lakes substations.

“MISO is collaborating with transmission owners to perform a reliability no-harm test,” Adu said, adding that it should have recommendations on the projects by July.

Finally, Wolverine Power Supply’s $3.7 million Iron Works station and 120-kV loop project to support induction furnace load in southeastern Michigan has not turned up any reliability issues so far, but MISO is still studying the project, Adu said.

— Amanda Durish Cook