By Amanda Durish Cook

Stakeholders gave MISO strong marks in this year’s annual customer opinion survey, but they still see room for improvement, especially with the interconnection queue, outage planning and transmission cost allocation.

MISO sent surveys to more than 457 companies and reported 24% participation, better than its historic 16 to 17% response rate.

“This is the best response rate we’ve ever gotten,” MISO Executive Director of External Affairs Kari Bennett said during an Oct. 24 call hosted by the Human Resource Committee of the Board of Directors.

Nearly 90% of respondents reported an overall satisfaction with MISO, the highest percentage in five years, while 83% said the RTO’s market rules and processes are transparent, the highest rating in four years. MISO has commissioned a survey since 2005 and scored an average 80% or better since 2012.

Bennett said stakeholders identified four areas of concern: MISO’s generation and transmission outage coordination process, transmission cost allocation, the lengthy interconnection process and quality of the search function on the website.

Bennett said the areas singled out for improvement were “not surprising,” as all the stakeholder-flagged issues have been discussed before in MISO public meetings.

Last month, outage-related congestion, combined with hot temperatures, drove real-time revenue sufficiency guarantee payments above $13 million, nearly doubling last year’s monthly total. Stakeholders and MISO officials in September agreed with the Independent Market Monitor that outages need to be more carefully scheduled. (See MISO in Harmony with IMM State of the Market Report.)

MISO is beta testing a new website design that will launch in December, Bennett said. “People right now say it’s easier to search Google [to find MISO information] than use our search function.”

Bennett also expressed in interest in how MISO’s new interconnection queue process will fare in next year’s survey, after being in place longer than a year. This year, stakeholders viewed the interconnection process as too long to be effective.

Survey respondents also asked for added benefit metrics aside from the adjusted production costs that MISO uses to mete out costs for the RTO’s market efficiency and multi-value projects, an issue the RTO and stakeholders will tackle in 2018.

MISO is developing responses and action plans based on survey responses, Bennett said.