MADISON, Wis. — MISO stakeholders from the environmental and consumer-advocate realms are on a mission to make the grid operator’s transmission planning more equitable in nature and accessible to the public.

Leading the charge is Yvonne Cappel-Vickery, the clean energy organizer for the Alliance for Affordable Energy, who said there’s a lack of accessibility within MISO for individual ratepayers to make their opinions heard on grid decisions that affect them.

During a public comment period at MISO Board Week held in Madison in mid-June, Cappel-Vickery introduced a set of equitable grid principles she wrote with a group of 25 scientists and activists from throughout the MISO footprint in the hope that MISO will adopt some or all of them in its transmission planning.

The principles call on MISO to prioritize renewable energy, climate resilience, indigenous rights, an environmentally conscious sourcing of infrastructure materials, worker protections, making meetings more user-friendly and communicating with and addressing concerns of impacted communities during system planning.

Cappel-Vickery told the MISO Board of Directors that transmission planning is “becoming increasingly public,” as evidenced by a recent article in the New York Times that emphasized that the clean energy transition is dependent on major transmission construction.

She asked the MISO Board of Directors to consider how the equity principles can be implemented into the RTO’s transmission planning and the Board of Directors governance.

Authors of the document also include members of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Environmental Law and Policy Center, Vote Solar, Healthy Gulf and the Center for Earth, Energy, and Democracy, among others. The representatives began connecting last summer to devise the principles.

“MISO and other RTOs are too heavily influenced by the interests of incumbent electricity industry players. Impacted communities and the general public are often marginalized in grid infrastructure decision making at the RTO level…Ultimately, decisions about the purpose and siting of billions of dollars in grid infrastructure are made with little public accountability,” the groups wrote in the equity  principles. They said MISO and state utility commissions are “generally inaccessible to the public and to impacted communities.”

“There are a lot of people getting more knowledgeable about the levers they can pull to make changes. We only have things to gain from feeling more empowered about the system that impacts all of our lives,” Cappel-Vickery said in an interview with RTO Insider.

Most of MISO’s stakeholder meetings are open to the public, but Cappel-Vickery said the learning curve to understand what’s being talked about is daunting.

She said MISO hosting some public meetings free of acronyms and pared-down technical speak would go a long way in making MISO more accessible to the public. She also said MISO can provide more accessible education so that the public understands the important work that it provides.

“It’s a lot of acronyms. RTO language isn’t just engineers. It’s also economists, public service commission staff, politicians. It’s like a convergence of four foreign languages,” she said. “When the equity conversation comes up, I think people get uneasy. And it’s hard. But one thing that is completely free is saying what you mean without acronyms. … I don’t think folks need to understand every nitty-gritty detail to understand that they want transmission to deliver cleaner and more reliable energy.”

Cappel-Vickery said when she explains the grid’s innerworkings, she often makes parallels to the highway system enabling trucks to deliver food to grocery stores.

Cappel-Vickery said the principles are designed to be iterative, and MISO could customize them.

“This is something that MISO can look at and say, ‘We can achieve four of these but maybe we can’t adopt these others right now.’ Even if they could only adopt some components of the principles, it would go far to show that MISO is taking this seriously,” she said.

Cappel-Vickery said the principles shouldn’t be construed as rebuke of MISO, either.

“From my work and perspective, MISO is not a bad guy. MISO does critical work, and we rely on their brilliant staff to keep the lights on,” she said.

Cappel-Vickery said MISO might approach the conversation by asking the authors of the grid principles to speak to staff and stakeholders at one of its public meetings. She said she realizes that equity planning isn’t something that RTOs have historically engaged in.

“Just because we haven’t done it before doesn’t mean we can’t do it now,” she said. “We just think there are ways planning could be a little bit better and more inclusive.”

Co-author and Union of Concerned Scientists Senior Energy Analyst Sam Gomberg said the set of equity principles “provide clear guidance to MISO regarding the future we need to be driving towards.”

“MISO is in the midst of an extraordinary transition to clean energy, and the decisions made at MISO affect every community located in its footprint. It’s critical to get it right,” he said in an emailed statement to RTO Insider. “…As MISO and its member utilities embark on an unprecedented build out of the transmission system to enable clean energy, communities will be asked to support these investments and host this infrastructure. These principles inform all of us about what needs to happen to garner their support and to be successful in our collective efforts to build an equitable, just, and clean energy future.”

Cappel-Vickery pointed out that MISO’s quarterly board meetings occur in the middle of a work week “at a time when anyone not expressly hired to do this is in working hours.” She said MISO might allow for public comments that aren’t reliant on attendance. MISO could dedicate an inbox to collecting emailed comments and could publish them or read them to board members during open sessions, she said.

She said that could lead to a resident of Louisiana, for example, telling MISO they’d like a more interconnected MISO South even if they aren’t available to travel or call in.

“That’s something that isn’t going to be a huge lift. We hear from MISO that they’re overburdened, that they’re experiencing labor shortages, but this is doable,” she said.

She also said MISO’s Consumer Advocate Sector could “activate” new members to be a mouthpiece for the public during meetings.

Cappel-Vickery suggested MISO embrace the stance that climate change is real from an apolitical, scientific perspective and should be planned for accordingly. She said it’s possible for MISO to discuss grid resilience in a way that expressly includes climate change.

“The way that it’s spoken about now, it seems like this opt-in. It doesn’t sound like it’s definitive, that this is something we need to address,” she said. “Here in south Louisiana, whether you believe in climate change or not, we’re experiencing storms that are more severe and more frequent.”

More Lines Equal Equity in MISO South

Cappel-Vickery, a New Orleans resident, said while she wants the equity in planning principles applied to MISO Midwest and MISO South alike, they would be particularly beneficial in MISO South.

Cappel-Vickery said in her experience, many MISO South residents welcome the idea of transmission expansion, viewing it as crucial to avoid prolonged outages during heatwaves or after hurricanes. She said the importance of equity planning was never more crystallized than in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida in 2021.

“People lost their lives after that storm. We don’t see transmission as being inherently bad at all,” she said.

She also said soaring summertime temperatures are cause for more intensive planning.

“I have no recollections in my childhood of experiencing 115-degree heat indexes. And now we have them multiple times per year. It seems imperative to include climate change modeling when they’re talking about reliability,” she said.

Cappel-Vickery said she shares concerns that Entergy’s outsized local reliability spending in the 2023 Transmission Expansion Plan could negate the need for larger, regional transmission and could lead to a “really skimpy” third cycle of MISO’s long-range transmission plan (LRTP) portfolio, which will be the first to contemplate MISO South subregional needs. (See Initial MTEP 23 Ignites Familiar Arguments over MISO South’s Reliability Spending.)

“There are a lot of questions around Entergy’s proposals. And we’re not OK with the cost burden falling completely on ratepayers,” Cappel-Vickery said of a regional-versus-local cost allocation. “Tranche 3 and Tranche 4 could hold incredible potential for ratepayers in MISO South. From our organizational standpoint, a worst-case scenario is we keep building more generation and never expand transmission.”

MISO: Onus is on Members and State Officials

MISO said it “acknowledges the importance of concepts such as those outlined in the equitable grid principles” but said it is limited in what it can do as it doesn’t own grid assets.

“We support our members’ goals as they address clean energy, siting and overall investment in electricity infrastructure. As MISO does not own, site or construct electricity infrastructure, our members and state regulators are a more appropriate venue to assess and appropriately address these matters. MISO’s role is to understand the impacts of our members’ plans as it relates to existing energy policies and provide insight on how to reliably implement their goals,” MISO spokesperson Brandon Morris said in an emailed statement to RTO Insider.