A record number of generator interconnection requests has ballooned MISO’s queue to 153 GW, the largest it’s ever been.
Developers this year submitted 487 proposals, doubling applications to 980, for approximately 77 GW of capacity. Were all the requests to be built, the 153 GW could handle MISO’s current systemwide summer peaks with about 30 GW to spare.
Staff said renewable projects account for about 64 GW of the new additions, with solar generation accounting for 63% of the total queue.
“Ultimately, we’ve had the largest set of requests come in in the history of our company,” Aubrey Johnson, executive director of system planning, told the Board of Directors’ System Planning Committee on Wednesday.
Johnson said prospective generators continue to struggle to connect to the grid. Historically, MISO interconnects about a fifth of the generation projects that enter the queue.
Johnson noted that in the past five years, MISO has tied in about 35 GW worth of new generation to its grid.
“In many ways, the queue still works,” he said. “It just wasn’t meant to handle the volume of requests we’re seeing today.”
A decade ago, MISO accepted just 12 GW worth of requests. By 2019, the amount of new requests had grown to 44 GW and then to 52 GW in 2020. Over the summer, the queue had dwindled to fewer than 80 GW and comprised approximately 500 projects.
“Know that we [are] rife [with] activity in the online queue portal,” Manager of Resource Utilization Jesse Phillips told the Interconnection Process Working Group (IPWG) in July.
MISO said the monstrous queue further validates its long-range transmission planning, which is partly intended to better connect renewable-rich areas of the footprint to the system.
“The majority of the … applicants are trending in line with meeting future clean energy goals set by our members and stakeholders,” Andy Witmeier, director of resource utilization, said in a press release. “As intermittent resources become more prevalent, the need for our long-range transmission planning efforts is reinforced to address potential operational challenges in the future and leverage our large regional footprint and resource diversity.”
Global consulting firm ICF recently found that interconnection customers in MISO and SPP exclusively fund interconnection upgrades that have broader benefits for their systems. (See Report: Renewable Developers Footing Tx Upgrade Bills.)
MISO said the 2021 group of proposals marked the first time that requests for energy storage interconnections outstrip requests for wind generation interconnection. MISO processed 44 GW worth of solar requests, 12 GW of storage and a little more than 9 GW in wind requests.
“We anticipated this shift towards more renewable technologies as a replacement for retiring conventional generation across the footprint, and we expect it to accelerate in the future,” Witmeier said.
The surge in storage requests come as MISO is readying its market platform to host storage offers by mid-2022. (See MISO: No Choice but to Double Up on 841 Compliance.)
MISO said it will share more details about the record-breaking interconnection cycle during its IPWG meeting on Monday.
