MISO is refreshing its longstanding “parking lot” of improvement ideas submitted to the grid operator, some of which have been in a holding pattern for the better part of a decade.
The RTO has conducted an internal review on how it handles issues relegated to the parking lot until MISO stakeholder committees deem it’s time to reexamine them. Some stakeholders have said topics they’ve brought forward can languish on the list.
Alison Lane, stakeholder relations lead, said during a Steering Committee teleconference Wednesday that MISO will now refer to inactive recommendations and will commit to their biannual reviews, beginning in 2024.
Staff will go before its large stakeholder committee meetings with a review and cleanup of the suggested improvements, Lane said. MISO will keep the issues that advance its imperative reliability work or that can be handled within the next three years and are supported by “the state of the industry’s” policies and technologies.
MISO currently has 36 issues in the parking lot, some of which are more than seven years old. Staff said some of the proposals have already been addressed with FERC rulemakings, as is the case with Order 2222 and allowing aggregators of distributed resources into the wholesale energy markets.
“We have every intention of being much more diligent on parking lot items” Lane promised earlier this year.
The parking lot designations were used under the RTO’s Integrated Roadmap process, where stakeholder input was used to annually prioritize a list of market tasks and improvements. MISO ended the practice last year. (See MISO Keeps Reduced Schedule for Rest of 2022.)
The grid operator is also encouraging a more standardized method for stakeholders to submit new issues that they think deserve MISO’s attention. After the roadmap process was scrapped, stakeholders said in public meetings they were left wondering how to broach ideas for improvements.
Staff stressed that stakeholders who want their ideas discussed in public meetings should complete its issues submission form. From there, the item is either directly considered by a stakeholder group or, when the assignment is less clear, the Steering Committee determines which stakeholder groups will take up the issues for consideration.
