By Amanda Durish Cook
CARMEL, Ind. — Recent market developments are compelling MISO to reconsider how it weighs the relative importance of its 15-year future scenarios designed to inform its 2018 Transmission Expansion Plan, staff said last week.
“The final MTEP futures reflect the various opinions of this group,” Matt Ellis, a MISO policy studies engineer, told the Planning Advisory Committee at its June 14 meeting. He noted that the RTO sifted through 128 pages of stakeholder input to create the four recently completed futures.
MISO is proposing to eliminate futures weighting — which assigns a probability-based likelihood to each MTEP planning scenario — in favor of placing equal importance on each of the four futures. The proposal comes after stakeholders criticized the RTO’s weighting process for not being transparent enough. Some MISO South members called for less stringent carbon-reduction estimates. (See MISO Changes MTEP Futures Weighting for South.)
“It comes down to no one knows what the future will bring,” Ellis said. “The whole point with this that we’re truly trying to acknowledge is no one knows what is going to happen 15 years out, so let’s give them equal consideration.”
Uncertain Outlook for Carbon, Nukes
President Trump’s decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on climate change prompted some stakeholders to ask if MISO should further reduce the 20% target carbon reduction in the accelerated alternative technologies future. (See Trump Pulling US Out of Paris Climate Accord.) Other stakeholders contend that some states’ renewed commitment to the agreement in the wake of Trump’s move indicated a possible need to increase the carbon-reduction constraint.
Ellis said MISO plans to keep the 20% carbon reduction measure. “It’s something we’ll keep an eye on,” he added.
Nuclear retirements easily earned the most stakeholder comment, according to Ellis. They were included last month as part of MISO’s fourth and newest future — a distributed and emerging technologies scenario. (See “MISO Tweaks 4th and Newest MTEP Future,” MISO Planning Advisory Committee Briefs.)
MISO will assume that 5 GW of nuclear will retire by 2032 based on the license expiration dates of five units in the RTO’s footprint, which include Callaway Unit 1 in Missouri, Clinton Unit 1 in Illinois, Palisades in Michigan, Point Beach Unit 1 in Wisconsin and River Bend Unit 1 in Louisiana.
Some stakeholders asked MISO to consider nuclear economic data in forecasting retirements, but Ellis reminded them that the RTO uses only public information to inform MTEP futures, precluding the inclusion of forecasted retirements based on the future financial viability of nuclear units, which is considered confidential.
Richard Seide of Apex Clean Energy said he was troubled that MISO would only use license expiration dates to forecast nuclear retirements. Ellis asked for stakeholders to submit their reasoning for including or removing other nuclear retirements from a future scenario.
Equal Weighting Spurs Doubts
Some stakeholders expressed surprise at MISO’s proposal to weigh all scenarios equally, saying they agreed on the futures under the assumption they would have input on weighting them.
“My concern boils down to: We’re pretty comfortable with the futures process now because we know we can weight them later. I think there will be a lot more focus on the development of futures,” WPPI Energy’s Steve Leovy said. He asked for MISO to delay finalizing the futures to ensure that stakeholders agree to those that could be applied equally across MTEP projects.
Stakeholders have until July 14 to comment on MISO’s proposal.
Ellis also said the RTO will attempt a series of workshops to improve project siting for the MTEP 19 cycle, especially for renewables. He said he would bring a proposal for workshops to the July Planning Advisory Committee meeting.
