The Midwest Reliability Organization said Tuesday that extremely hot temperatures driving up demand will continue to be a concern for its planning coordinators through September.
Scorching days over large swaths of the country will threaten reliability through the end of summer, MRO officials said during the organization’s 2021 Regional Summer Assessment webinar.
MRO said MISO, SPP and Saskatchewan Power Corp. remain vulnerable to emergency declarations and could operate below their reserve requirement over the next two and a half months. Only Manitoba Hydro was assessed to be in good shape for summer operations.
“MISO’s reserve margin in particular is very tight, just 4% above the reserve margin requirement,” Salva Andiappan, MRO’s principal engineer of reliability assessments, said. The RTO entered the summer with a 22% reserve margin, compared to its 18.3% requirement.
Andiappan said an extreme summer peak paired with generation outages could have MISO exhausting its capacity resources and requiring energy transfers from neighbors.
The grid operator has already had one maximum generation emergency this summer, when forced generation outages and persistent heat forced a brief emergency declaration and the use of load-modifying resources. (See “MISO Defends June Emergency Declaration,” MISO Market Subcommittee Briefs: July 8, 2021.)
MRO estimated that an extremely low generation scenario could leave MISO with just 116 GW in available resources to handle extreme load of almost 124 GW. In SPP, an extremely low generation scenario of 50.4 GW paired with extreme demand of nearly 56 GW could leave it deficient.
Saskatchewan Power, on the other hand, could scrape by with about 200 MW of surplus generation — still below its reserve requirement — if it faced a low-generation, high-peak load day. Manitoba Hydro’s would still be within its 12% reserve margin requirement even faced with extremely low generation availability and an extreme peak load.
Under normal peak demand conditions, Andiappan said all four planning coordinators could have sufficient resources.
“Conventional generation resource performance and availability is key to meeting projected summer demand,” he said.
