CARMEL, Ind. — MISO says it won’t place conditions on either queue entrants or generation retirements in its quest to maintain system reliability by prescribing generating attributes.
MISO has defined six system reliability attributes as necessary, including availability, rapid start times, the ability to deliver long-duration energy at a high output and providing voltage stability, ramp-up capability and fuel supply certainty. The RTO is studying what role it can play in maintaining those increasingly scarce reliability attributes from generation in the long term. (See MISO Charting Course on Stimulating Generating Attributes.)
MISO has committed to publishing by year’s end an action plan on attributes that will detail what changes it thinks might be necessary. It revealed a few ideas last week.
At a Nov. 8 Resource Adequacy Subcommittee, Director of Policy Studies Jordan Bakke said there should be several options to stimulate attributes to solve MISO’s reliability problems. However, he said there’s no need to account for reliability attributes in MISO’s generation interconnection queue or generator retirement study process.
Still, Bakke said MISO faces near-term reliability risks for “up to 10 years.” Bakke said MISO foresees not having enough energy because of generator availability, fuel constraints, time-limited resources and resources limited by their locations.
Bakke said solutions are best served through bumping up capacity requirements, revamping capacity accreditation and devising other market solutions to “let a broad range of resources compete to meet required demand.”
“The idea is not to attract certain types of resources, but attract capabilities in aggregate,” he said. The “complex interactions between different resource types makes it difficult” to prescribe quantities of generator availability, energy duration, fuel requirements and other adequacy attributes.
Bill Booth, consultant to the Mississippi Public Service Commission, urged MISO to reconsider its belief that it doesn’t need to attempt to delay generator retirements to retain reliability attributes preparing to depart the system.
Booth said since MISO isn’t willing to place stipulations on generation retirements, it’s left with two choices: “reduce the load or increase construction.” However, he said if MISO doesn’t advise what kinds of generation it needs, utilities will be in the dark on what to build, and if MISO is trying to encourage some resources attributes, then it isn’t technically resource neutral.
Booth also asked if MISO would consider assigning costs to load-serving entities whose fuel mixes are creating attribute deficiencies in the fleet. MISO staff took notes on Booth’s comments.
Bakke said MISO will need to draw on its system flexibility — rapid start time and ramping — more often. He said for that, MISO could expand its market participation models to increase the types of resources eligible to provide services and expand its selection of ancillary service products to let a broad range of resources compete to meet need.
MISO expects to have enough aggregate flexibility, Bakke said, but the challenge is sending it where it needs to be because of growing operational uncertainty. The good news, he said, is that small, regional flexibility deficiencies can be solved inexpensively and brought to market within a few years. He also said more system flexibility could be achieved through responsive load.
Bakke said to address voltage stability, MISO is simply going to need to add more resources that can provide it. He said MISO isn’t planning on creating new market products tailored to voltage stability because stability issues usually are local in nature. However, he said MISO could add generator interconnection voltage performance requirements for critical reliability capabilities “as needed.”
MISO is accepting stakeholders’ feedback to its early solution ideas on reliability attributes through the end of 2023.
The RTO used its middle-of-the-road transmission planning future to run analyses to quantify its future needs related to rapid start-up and ramp-up capability, generator availability, fuel and energy assurance, and voltage stability.
The generation fleet predicted under MISO’s second planning future largely is based on MISO members’ announced plans and predicts MISO will have a total 471 GW in installed capacity by 2042.
