MISO acknowledged this week that a December approval of its first long-range transmission projects is out of reach and must wait until early spring.

The grid operator originally planned to submit the first collection of long-range projects with the 2021 MISO Transmission Expansion Plan (MTEP 21) in December. Staff planners had warned in recent weeks that meeting the pre-Christmas approval was increasingly unrealistic.

Now, MISO is targeting board approval of the long-range projects in March.

“We recognize that to have it before the board for approval by December is increasingly unlikely,” Aubrey Johnson, executive director of system planning, told stakeholders during a Planning Advisory Committee teleconference Wednesday.

MISO will still consider any long-range projects approved in March as part of MTEP 21.

“I want to put that out there to allay any concerns with stakeholders about an aggressive timetable,” Johnson said.

“We’re making progress,” Senior Manager of Transmission Planning Coordination Jarred Miland assured stakeholders. He said staff will soon unveil some potential long-range transmission solutions.

Stakeholders voiced concern that MISO was postponing the projects’ approval and still categorizing them under MTEP 21.

“There nothing that says every single project has to go through the board of directors in December,” Miland said. “It’s just that’s the way we’ve done it. We can do this as an addendum.”

Jeff Webb, the RTO’s senior director of transmission planning, agreed that “there’s nothing keeping” MISO from bringing some project recommendations to the board on a deferred basis.

“We have had occasions for this in the past. We don’t see any concern in the tariff about staff completing an analysis and submitting a project when they finish,” Webb said. “Now, the board is not too keen on the board approving projects in many months, so we keep it on an annual routine.”

WEC Energy Group’s Chris Plante said it was unclear how the MTEP’s bottom-up planning approach will mesh with the long-range plan’s top-down planning. MISO typically studies MTEP project needs after transmission owners propose them. In the long-range plan, staff will study and prescribe system needs.

MISO said it already has been fielding project ideas from stakeholders to resolve known issues, although the RTO hasn’t formally opened a proposal window.

Staff have stressed that the long-range plan is contemplating regional transmission solutions, not seeking to make interconnections easier for new generation. MISO planners have repeatedly said their concerns lie in the transmission system’s reliability over the next two decades.

“Our focus is to make sure we have a reliable system to serve a future load with reliability targets,” Senior Economic Planning Engineer Ranjit Amgai said during a July 30 workshop teleconference.

MTEP 21

MISO will recommend 367 new projects, valued at $3.4 billion under MTEP 21, for board approval in December. This year’s package is lower than MTEP 20’s final $4.05 billion spend on 493 projects.

This year’s MTEP contains 49 generator interconnection projects at $319 million, 61 baseline reliability projects at $462 million, and 257 “other” projects at $2.65 billion. The “other” category is reserved for projects that address load growth, reliability needs, and age and condition-related fixes.

MTEP 21’s most expensive project is the $196-million rebuild of the Golden Meadow to Barataria 115 kV line near New Orleans. The line will be rebuilt to a 230-kV rating after 2020’s Hurricane Zeta damaged it.

The Planning Advisory Committee will vote on whether to recommend the MTEP report during its September meeting. Regardless of the voting outcome, MTEP 21 will advance to the board’s System Planning Committee for final consideration.

MISO is currently managing 2,282 active MTEP transmission projects representing $12.45 billion, dating back to the 2008 MTEP cycle. The grid operator expects most of those projects to come online over the next three years.

Transmission owners this week also asked for a simplified database to report the status of approved MTEP projects.

Speaking during Tuesday’s Planning Subcommittee, ITC Transmission’s Cynthia Crane encouraged MISO to “create a new platform with input from all stakeholders, not just the transmission owners.”

She said MISO currently maintains too many status options to choose from, causing TOs to use different terms to describe identical project stages. She said that under the current process, TOs unnecessarily describe their projects multiple times.

Crane asked for a more standard set of status categories and clearer MISO expectations for when cost updates are required.

Staff is also considering whether it should create separate forms and processes that allow retiring generators to convert to synchronous condensers under MISO’s non-transmission alternatives consideration.

“It’s probably a very limited application,” MISO’s Jeanna Furnish said.