EAGAN, Minn. — MISO’s system is at the mercy of faster interconnections of new resources and retirement delays, executives said in a quarterly address to the board and stakeholders.
MISO CEO John Bear said he wants to get to the bottom of why resources can’t be built sooner. MISO is sitting on a stockpile of about 50 GW across 316 projects that have been approved to connect to the system but are experiencing holdups in construction. According to MISO, the projects experience an average of 650 days to commercial operation.
Bear said the mostly intermittent generation in the queue isn’t a full substitute for the baseload generation that continues to fall off its system.
“You’ve got a mismatch of reliability attributes coming on the system,” Bear said during a June 27 board meeting. “We’ve got a lot of work to do to slow down the retirements and speed up the additions coming onto the system.”
Senior Vice President and Chief Customer Officer Todd Hillman likened the “enormity” of MISO’s transition to a Rubik’s cube where members twist cubes to get one side monochromatic and then realize other sides remain multicolored. He said he expects hitches as utilities work out how to solve the puzzle.
Hillman said members want to achieve decarbonization while paying attention to reliability and affordability. But he also said MISO expects anywhere from 12 GW to 14 GW of load growth in coming years from data centers alone.
“That would be like adding 11 million homes. And these have much higher capacity factors than homes. That’s just a gigantic addition to a grid that’s already stressed,” Hillman said. He added that “poor visibility into the magnitude and timing of large load additions is putting at risk our ability to reliably accommodate them.”
MISO said announced load additions in the footprint from manufacturing projects and data centers total more than 8 GW. Broken down, the projects account for 3 GW apiece in MISO’s South and Central regions and 2.4 GW in the North region. All projects aim to be online by 2030.
Stakeholder Services Executive Director Suzie Jaworowski said MISO maintains and updates a list of announced load additions so members can decide how to prepare.
Last month, MISO and the Organization of MISO States said if members don’t delay retirements or bring more resources online than typically occur historically, a potential 2.7-GW deficit next year could balloon to 14 GW in 2029. (See OMS-MISO RA Survey: Potential 14-GW Capacity Deficit by Summer 2029.)
Bear said MISO should delve into probabilistic load forecasting. He said it’s clear its deterministic load forecasting based on historical experiences won’t keep MISO best prepared.
Despite striking more than 20 GW in generator interconnection agreements last year, MISO experiences an average of just 5 GW per year of nameplate capacity coming online. In a separate meeting, Vice President of System Planning Aubrey Johnson also said longstanding construction lags persist and MISO and developers need to find ways to accelerate in-service dates.
“The number of gigawatts coming online is insufficient for what we’re seeing coming,” he said during a June 25 meeting of System Planning Committee of the MISO Board of Directors.
