CARMEL, Ind. — MISO last week said it will salvage two to-do items from its effort a few years ago to better link up interconnection trends with annual transmission planning.
But the RTO warned that it will likely be years before it has the time to work out possible solutions for them.
The grid operator will keep two unaddressed stakeholder suggestions on hold: one to develop more robust analyses to recommend alternative projects to transmission owners’ proposals, and another to devise a method to evaluate network upgrade projects for potential regionally allocated market efficiency projects.
Jeanna Furnish, MISO’s director of expansion planning, said the two items are the only ones left unaddressed from the project it launched a few years ago to better match its annual transmission planning with the projects that generation developers submit to the interconnection queue. (See MISO Begins Bid to Merge Tx, Queue Planning.)
Since then, MISO has begun recommending and planning portfolios under its long-range transmission planning (LRTP) initiative, satisfying most of the endeavor. The RTO had suggested dropping the listing altogether as part of a cleanup of old stakeholder recommendations, but the Environmental Groups sector protested the deletion. (See MISO Proposes Review of Improvement Ideas’ ‘Parking Lot’.)
“At this time, we don’t foresee having enough resources to be able to work on this until at least 2025,” Furnish warned stakeholders at the Planning Advisory Committee meeting Wednesday. She said MISO’s LRTP effort is already dominating the manpower needed to create an alternatives or evaluation process. It will consider the recommendations “inactive” until 2025.
Earlier in spring, the Sustainable FERC Project’s Natalie McIntire argued the concerns that gave rise to MISO’s retired Coordinated Planning Process Task Team (CPPTT) remain: “MISO has no process to evaluate whether a transmission project required for either generator interconnection or a transmission service request also meets the criteria” of a baseline reliability project or market efficiency project. She argued that the RTO’s tariff demands due diligence across its planning practices.
McIntire said she believes MISO has a duty under FERC Order 1000 to look for more cost-effective transmission alternatives that combine planning needs. But she said MISO simply assures stakeholders it is already doing that, though not much is known about the process.
“MISO must comply with its tariff and create a process by which projects can be evaluated to see if they meet the criteria of other project types,” McIntire said.
The RTO closed out the CPPTT in 2020 when it began working on the first of its LRTP portfolios. At the time, it reasoned that the hefty, comprehensive transmission portfolios would cover the need for an examination into the depth and interconnectedness of its transmission planning amid the clean energy transition.
McIntire said her concerns would be assuaged if MISO committed to conducting the LRTP on a regular basis, but the RTO has not said it has a frequency in mind for long-range planning. She also said LRTP studies take multiple years to finish, making a cadence difficult to establish. Interconnection requests in the intervening years between LRTP studies could turn up network upgrades that would be better suited as regional or reliability projects, she said.
MISO’s newly revived Stakeholder Governance Working Group is working on how it can have a structured process for closing out stakeholder-submitted ideas for improvement. Today, the RTO doesn’t have a formal process for removing stakeholders’ recommendations from its to-do list.
