By Amanda Durish Cook

CARMEL, Ind. — MISO stakeholders will vote on whether to broaden export limits for its upcoming capacity auction after WPPI Energy called for the RTO to act.

WPPI engineer Steve Leovy said MISO has not been distinguishing imports sourced outside the RTO from those sourced inside in calculating its capacity export limit (CEL), making available transmission capacity appear scarcer than it really is. MISO calculates capacity import and export limits for each local resource zone to assure that cleared capacity can be delivered.

“We have a small amount of excess capacity in Zone 1, so we stand to have an adverse financial impact if the limit binds,” Leovy said at last week’s Resource Adequacy Subcommittee meeting.

Leovy said Zone 1’s CEL is 516 MW, but the zone cleared 613 MW in the 2017/18 Planning Resource Auction. Zone 1 — which covers portions of Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas and Montana — has more contributing external resources than any other zone in MISO, Leovy said.

“We’re concerned with what we see is improper clearing in the coming Planning Resource Auction,” Leovy said. He asked MISO to calculate “appropriate, accurate” limits for the 2018/2019 auction. His motion, calling for the RTO to ensure alignment between the PRA and CEL calculations, will be voted on in an email ballot through Nov. 15.

MISO was planning to update CELs with the creation of external resource zones, but the proposal is now on hold until the 2019/20 planning year. (See MISO Postpones External Zones Until 2019 Auction.)

Laura Rauch, MISO resource adequacy manager, said the RTO still plans to create new CELs that correspond with any new external zones that MISO designates. “Our concern is moving a piece of this forward without the rest of it,” she said.

Rauch also said MISO’s capacity import limits (CILs) and CELs are linked, and it would be inappropriate to update one without the other.

MISO’s CIL calculation was changed to account for counterflows created by exports to neighboring balancing authorities in response to a FERC order in 2015 (EL15-70, et al.). Leovy said a similar change is needed for CELs.

Some stakeholders said that while they could see others supporting an export limit change, they doubted stakeholders wanted to change CILs and local clearing requirements.

‘Shopped Around’

NRG Energy’s Tia Elliott said Leovy made a motion that didn’t result in action during a similar presentation at a spring 2016 Loss-of-Load-Expectation Working Group. “I’m concerned that maybe that this is being shopped around,” Elliott said.

“Thanks for the reminder that this is something that we’ve been discussing with MISO for quite some time. MISO is aware that this is an issue,” Leovy responded. “All I’m asking for is a vote to the timeline to get this fixed, and I don’t think this is forum-shopping or dodging the stakeholder process.”

Elliott also pointed out that the limits have already been set for the upcoming planning year in MISO’s loss-of-load-expectation study, and said changing them now would complicate the process.

Leovy said MISO may be able to implement a fix that doesn’t involve revising its Tariff, because it defines CELs as the megawatts of planning resources that can be “reliably exported” from a local resource zone. He believes the language supports transmission providers modeling the physical location of load and planning resources, giving MISO enough information to differentiate between external and internal capacity.