MISO Returns to 2022 Finish for Order 841 Compliance

FERC’s refusal to grant MISO a second delay on incorporating storage in its markets has the RTO hustling to stick to its original deadline. (See FERC Rejects MISO Request for 2nd Order 841 Delay.)

“We’re moving forward to comply with the one-year-from-now deadline. We’re looking at how we’re going to juggle that with other priorities,” MISO Executive Director of Market Operations Shawn McFarlane told stakeholders at a Market Subcommittee meeting Thursday.  

Earlier in June, MISO General Counsel Timothy Caister said the RTO may seek rehearing on the order, but it is currently preparing its aging market platform to host storage offers.

Stakeholders asked MISO for more details about the cost of rolling out storage participation on the current market platform and how compliance may affect other market projects and the platform replacement itself.

Others asked for MISO to circulate a rehearing request before it files with FERC.

MISO corporate counsel Jacob Krouse said it’s not RTO procedure to share rehearing requests with stakeholders ahead of filing. He said it’s MISO’s prerogative to seek rehearing without consulting the stakeholder community.

For now, it remains to be seen how the inclusion of storage offers will affect MISO’s market platform replacement. The grid operator had argued that its June 6, 2022, Order 841 compliance deadline stood to postpone the launch of a new platform.

MISO is set to begin parallel operations on its new market user interface on July 6 and its new cloud-based, one-stop modeling manager in mid-September. Both efforts are tied into the larger platform replacement project.

MISO Calls 2nd Max Gen Emergency of 2021

Battling a heat wave and generation outages, MISO enacted a maximum generation event for its Central and North regions for a few hours on Thursday afternoon.

The grid operator said it contended with above-normal temperatures paired with high load and forced outages. The emergency was called for about 2 to 5 p.m. and never escalated beyond use of load-modifying resources.

Ahead of the heat, MISO instated a capacity advisory for its North and Central regions Wednesday that escalated into a maximum generation warning Thursday morning.

The event was MISO’s second emergency event of 2021. The first was called amid the February winter storm’s grip on much of the nation. (See MISO: Wintry Weather Vindicates RA Changes.)

MISO Begins Exploration of SATA for Market Services

MISO is beginning to contemplate how its storage serving as transmission can also participate in its energy markets.

Adviser Michael Robinson opened a presentation by explaining the difference between a permutation and a combination. In a permutation, the order of the items matter, he said.

He asked stakeholders for any ideas on how MISO might arrange the functions of storage resources to allow for dual usage.

“We do understand the value-stacking of these assets,” Robinson said.

When MISO staff drafted rules around storage-as-transmission-only assets (SATOA) in 2019, they repeatedly promised that they would soon chart a new process for storage to function simultaneously as transmission and participate in the markets. (See FERC Greenlights MISO Storage-as-Tx Proposal.)

Robinson asked if a storage asset’s transmission use needs could be predictable enough for MISO to confidently schedule storage assets for market services.

Compensation for market services also requires some thought, he told stakeholders.

“How do we compensate these assets for market services when they’re getting full recovery of cost today?” he asked stakeholders rhetorically.

Robinson said existing SATOA won’t be able to skip MISO’s generator interconnection queue to gain market entry, as they are able to currently.

MISO will take stakeholder suggestions on the issue through the end of June.

“We want to get as much out of our storage asset for the benefit of our customers,” American Transmission Co.’s Bob McKee offered.

MISO Investigating FTR Underfunding

MISO said it’s noticed a recent problem with underfunding of financial transmission rights.

“We’ve initiated a review of the FTR market,” McFarlane revealed. He said MISO staff are running diagnostics to see what’s driving the poorer financial performance.

However, McFarlane stressed that MISO’s FTRs are still “substantially funded” near 100%. “We’d like them to be 100% again,” he added.

The RTO is looking for improvements to implement in 2022, McFarlane said.

Earlier this year, MISO Director of Market Administration John Harmon said “new and variable congestion patterns” are to blame for the underfunding, particularly those brought on by more wind generation and warmer winters in general. He said the underfunding became more prominent in the fourth quarter of 2020.

Harmon said MISO has begun modeling more constraints on its the transmission system to address the problem. He said MISO wants to make sure it exactly matches what it auctions off with what is available.

McFarlane promised more discussion at upcoming subcommittee meetings.

Hurricane Laura has Domino Pricing Effect

MISO will resettle about $10 million in pricing on Aug. 27 related to Hurricane Laura, staff announced Thursday.

In the course of reviewing its practice of pricing dead buses at the value of lost load during the hurricane with its Independent Market Monitor in a nonpublic setting, MISO said it discovered a discrepancy in its hourly commercial pricing node between the day-ahead and real-time markets. (See MISO to Outline New Pricing Plan for Hurricanes.)

MISO said the difference arises when there are de-energized elemental pricing nodes within a commercial pricing node. The RTO’s hourly real-time commercial node pricing uses an aggregation of LMPs at both live and dead elemental pricing nodes, while hourly day-ahead and five-minute real-time commercial node pricing aggregates only the LMPs at live elemental pricing nodes.

MISO said its working with market platform vendor General Electric to install a patch so hourly real-time pricing lines up with both five-minute real-time and hourly day-ahead settlements. The patch will be ready June 22, MISO said.

Director of Settlements Laura Rauch said it will take about a month to reprice and resettle prices on Aug. 27, when Laura made landfall in the Gulf of Mexico. MISO will reprice real-time hourly commercial node prices; the change will not affect day-ahead pricing.

McFarlane said he expects “some disputes will fall away” from members over Laura pricing when MISO applies the fix.

“I know it won’t settle all of the disputes that were filed. But some of them,” he said.

McFarlane said the error can be traced back to the introduction of five-minute settlements in 2018.

“This is a continuing error, so we’re figuring out what to do for the rest of the days,” McFarlane said.

Rauch said the discrepancy became apparent during the “dramatic and abnormal price separation” caused by the storm.

She said it’s unlikely that the error will have much impact outside of abnormal weather days. “So we’re talking about impacts that are very, very small outside of events like this,” Rauch said, adding that MISO will investigate the mid-February cold snap as well.