MISO said last week it will begin discussions next month on inverter-based resource performance requirements as the industry inches toward standardization.
Patrick Dalton, a power studies engineer, said during an Interconnection Process Working Group meeting Tuesday that the RTO has an imperative to get ahead of potential IBR performance issues noted in recent NERC disturbance reports. Dalton told stakeholders that by June, MISO hopes to have detailed performance requirements that can be drafted for the tariff.
“We are seeing this as part of how reliability attributes work,” Dalton said, referencing the grid operator’s ongoing discussion on attracting generation with certain system reliability attributes. Staff have defined six attributes as essential: availability, delivering long-duration energy at a high output, rapid start-up times, voltage stability, ramp-up capability and fuel assurance. (See MISO Considers Resource Attributes as Thermal Output Falls.)
Dalton said MISO will begin its work by looking into recent grid reliability disturbances. (See NERC Repeats IBR Warnings After Second Odessa Event.)
“The level of alarm continues to increase here,” he said, noting that one of two disturbances near Odessa, Texas, caused about 1 GW of solar resources to trip offline in ERCOT. “If there is any silver lining of these NERC reports, it’s that these events can be prevented if we were to implement standardized functions.”
MISO has time to avert issues, Dalton said, because most IBRs have yet to come online. He said the time to act is a “luxury” that other regions don’t have.
The RTO said standard IBR requirements are likely to benefit voltage stability, small-signal stability, voltage control and detection of short-circuit faults.
The discussions coincide with and are inspired by FERC’s notice of proposed rulemaking issued last year to implement IBR reliability standards (RM22-12). The grid operator said it will draw on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ recent standard for the resources’ interconnection and performance (IEEE 2800-2022) to form its requirements.
