By Amanda Durish Cook

CARMEL, Ind. — MISO officials said last week they will consider stakeholders’ request that it seek a second extension on FERC’s deadline for introducing five-minute market settlements.

The RTO is about three months behind schedule on creating a market program to achieve five-minute settlement intervals under FERC Order 825, Chris Delk, MISO manager of market settlements, said during a Sept. 14 Market Subcommittee meeting.

Delk said implementation is delayed because needed software code cannot be written until MISO completes replacement of its settlements computer system in the fourth quarter. The RTO was slated to begin stakeholder testing of the program at the end of the year, but it is now unclear whether it will meet that deadline. MISO will release software components as soon as it can, he said.

Last month, several stakeholders asked the RTO to consider delaying five-minute settlements to give members more time to develop and test their own software changes. (See “Five-Minute Settlements Delayed?” MISO Market Subcommittee Briefs: Aug. 10, 2017.)

MISO officials responded then that FERC had already granted MISO a March 1, 2018, deadline — seven weeks later than the order’s required date — to allow time for deploying the new settlements system (ER17-778). MISO’s real-time settlements are currently based on an hourly average price, while real-time operating reserve settlements are conducted on a five-minute basis already.

On Thursday, MSC attendees voted 30-1 to urge MISO to request an additional extension from FERC. The stakeholder motion asks for the release of final business practice manuals at least four months ahead of parallel operations testing of the new settlements system. It also requests at least 12 weeks of testing before a go-live date.

“Our intent here is to gain that three-month delay back for our stakeholders,” said Northern Indiana Public Service Co.’s Bill SeDoris, who introduced the motion.

Because the RTO’s new settlement system is taking longer to go live than originally intended, SeDoris said, MISO members need time to review and adapt to the settlement rules, seek vendors to update related software and finish new coding.

Bladen said meeting those demands could delay the implementation date of five-minute settlements until next summer.

“It puts us at risk for FERC to deny a delay. The response we’ve [gotten] from FERC [thus far] is that a motion for delay is not off the table, but an unreasonably long motion of delay would be unwelcome,” Bladen said.

Bladen nonetheless agreed to take the stakeholder request to MISO management. FERC might be more amenable to MISO filing closer to the standing deadline with the explanation that it is still working on implementation, he said.