When it emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, MISO wants to limit its in-person stakeholder committee schedule to eight in-person meeting weeks per year.

The grid operator said it wants to group all stakeholder meetings of its main parent entities into eight separate weeks during the year. That means five full-day meetings will be packed into a single week. MISO hopes to debut the schedule beginning in late January.

MISO defines its main parent entities as the Market Subcommittee, Reliability Subcommittee, Resource Adequacy Subcommittee, Planning Advisory Committee, and Regional Expansion Criteria and Benefits Working Group, which makes cost-allocation decisions.

The committees currently meet monthly in separate weeks dubbed as planning week, markets week and reliability week.

MISO says the new arrangement will cut down on travel plans and registrations. The meeting weeks will be held on-site at either its Carmel, Ind., Eagan, Minn., or Little Rock, Ark., building locations. The weeks will be considered separate from MISO’s board weeks, which are held quarterly at off-site locations.

If a committee wants to add additional meetings in a calendar year, the chairs must schedule a teleconference. Smaller committees like the Planning Subcommittee and the Loss of Load Expectation and the Interconnection Process Working Groups will also meet exclusively virtually.

Todd Hillman, the RTO’s senior vice president and chief customer officer, said MISO also wants to make more use of joint committee meetings. He said staff often deliver the same presentation over multiple stakeholder meetings.

“It keeps our [subject matter experts] on a hamster wheel where they don’t have new things to discuss, but they’re forced to put a presentation together,” Hillman said during a Wednesday Advisory Committee teleconference. “We want to try to get to the meat and potatoes of what we really want to discuss.”

MISO said it will kick off meeting weeks with executive updates. It also said it won’t schedule any stakeholder meetings after the December board week, which typically takes place during the month’s second week. Hillman said the new schedule will avoid meetings scheduled too close to holidays.

The Coalition of MISO Transmission Customers engineer Kevin Murray asked whether MISO would introduce a vaccine mandate before it begins holding in-person meetings.

“It’s one that we’re struggling and juggling with every day,” Hillman said. “We’ve talked about vaccination proof; we’ve talked about masking; we’ve talked about COVID testing; we’ve talked about social distancing and how that’s done with meetings of our size.”

Hillman said MISO will survey stakeholders’ willingness to vaccinate, mask and submit to testing at MISO facilities.

He also said MISO will try to get a feel of its members’ travel budgets and restrictions, which Hillman said are currently “all over the place.”

“If we have eight stakeholders show up, that’s not going to be ideal,” he said.

Some stakeholders said packing executive updates and five all-day meetings during the work week might be a whirlwind, with some referring to the eight weeks as “MISO Superweeks.”

Madison Gas and Electric’s Megan Wisersky worried that a “superweek” could lead to burnout. “No one should underestimate the amount of work this is, especially when a company sends one representative,” she said.

Hillman promised more details on the new schedule soon.

During a Thursday board meeting, CEO John Bear said it’s becoming clear that the COVID-19 virus is something that MISO will have to learn to live with. The grid operator has planned an in-person Board Week in Orlando, Fla., in early December. It will be its first in-person meeting in almost two years.

Bear also said staff was welcomed back to the office Sept. 7 in a hybrid in-person and virtual format, despite the Delta variant’s threat.

“We’ve got a greater than 85% vaccination rate,” he said of MISO’s more than 1,000 employees. The grid operator has not yet enacted a vaccine mandate for staff.

CFO Melissa Brown said the pandemic continues to cause higher-than-expected employee vacancies and delays in building maintenance and outside consulting services. Altogether, COVID-19 is expected to yield a $4 million savings to MISO’s base operating budget, now at $267.7 million.  The COVID reductions are partially offset by an unexpected $1.5 million in legal fees MISO spent after it decided to initiate rolling blackouts during February’s winter storm. (See MISO Begins Cold Snap Examination.)

Stakeholder ID Rules 

The new meeting schedule coincides with new etiquette requirements for stakeholders during meetings.

Members voted in new rules that encourage stakeholders to identify themselves and their companies before they speak in public meetings. The Advisory Committee approved the ruleset by consent on Wednesday

Rules for consultants are a bit more complex. If a consultant is working under a non-disclosure agreement, they must name the MISO sector aligned with the company they represent. Consultants are also expected to announce when they begin speaking whether they represent multiple clients.

To sign in to virtual meetings, stakeholders must also provide their full first and last names.

The instructions will be enshrined in the MISO Stakeholder Governance Guide’s procedures section. The approved language concludes more than a year of debate on the topic. (See MISO Members Greenlight Stakeholder ID Rules.)

Steering Committee Chair Jeff Dodd confirmed that the language will empower committee chairs to stop recognizing stakeholders during meetings if they’ve refused to disclose their name, company or sector affiliation.

Hillman, cueing up the meeting’s next topic, identified himself as working for MISO and “representing all sectors.”

“I’m an Aries, I’m 52 years old and I married my high school sweetheart,” Hillman joked.