CARMEL, Ind. — MISO members are mulling an advisory vote on whether to support the RTO’s $21.8 billion long-range transmission plan (LRTP) portfolio while tensions simmer between MISO and its Independent Market Monitor over the necessity of the major transmission expansion.  

On Nov. 8, MISO’s Planning Advisory Committee (PAC) took up whether to recommend that the 2024 Transmission Expansion Plan (MTEP 24) — which includes the second LRTP portfolio — proceed to the System Planning Committee of the Board of Directors for consideration. The PAC settled on an email ballot that will be conducted over the next two weeks. A final decision on the LRTP portfolio alongside MTEP 24 is expected from the full MISO Board of Directors in early December.  

Director of Cost Allocation and Competitive Transmission Jeremiah Doner said from a reliability perspective, it’s cost-effective to build the 24-project, mostly 765-kV “regional highway” and confidently avoid future risks rather than building one-off projects to handle vulnerabilities.  

MISO anticipates a benefit-to-cost ratio of between 1.8:1 and 3.5:1 over the first 20 years of the LTRP projects’ lives through reliability improvements, production costs, capacity that won’t be built and environmental benefits. 

“What is happening on the system is unprecedented with the resource transition, and we have a shared responsibility … to be proactive,” Doner told stakeholders. 

MISO’s End-Use Customer Sector asked that this year’s PAC vote on MTEP be a proportional vote, where sectors can divide their votes into a percentage to separately consider the $6.7 billion of traditional MTEP 24 local spending, the $21.8 billion LRTP and the $1.65 billion Joint Targeted Interconnection Queue transmission portfolio in partnership with SPP. MTEP 24 comprises all three. The End-Use Sector said this year’s PAC vote deserves some nuance because of the sheer amount of investment involved.   

MISO’s Independent Market Monitor David Patton capped a campaign against the second LRTP portfolio during a late October meeting of some of MISO’s board members. Patton once again argued that benefits are exaggerated and MISO is not working from a realistic set of future resource assumptions. (See MISO IMM Makes Closing Arguments Against $21.8B Long-range Tx Plan.)  

MISO said it “disagrees that the benefit calculations are flawed, in error or arbitrary.” The grid operator also is resolute that it will not test the value of the LRTP portfolio against a future scenario where it never develops the LRTP projects. 

“The future scenarios used for LRTP are appropriate, and the development of a new resource plan without transmission would be inappropriate,” MISO said. “The objective of LRTP is to understand the value of transmission based on the collective member resource plans as represented in the future. This approach is how MISO and others have performed benefit analysis for regional transmission for more than a decade.” 

Further, MISO formally disagreed with the IMM’s State of the Market recommendation from 2022 to improve the LRTP process and benefit projections. The RTO said it was contradicting its Monitor after extensive evaluation and affirmed its support for the LRTP process. 

MISO said the LRTP and “other transmission planning processes are not in scope for the IMM’s role to evaluate and monitor the performance of the markets.” 

At the October Market Subcommittee meeting, Patton argued that the capacity expansion MISO envisions through the early 2040s and based the portfolio on is “extremely unrealistic” and “not reflective of what the states and utilities say they’re going to do.” He also said MISO continues to overinflate the benefits of the portfolio and pinned the value of LRTP II closer to a 0.3:1 benefit-to-cost ratio. 

“I think we have a major problem here on where we are on LRTP,” he told stakeholders, and advocated for a pause on the process to “come up with a portfolio with benefits that truly justify the costs.” At that point, Market Subcommittee Chair Tom Weeks asked the lMM to focus solely on issues germane to markets. He said the Market Subcommittee isn’t the venue to discuss transmission planning. The exchange was emblematic of some members maintaining that the IMM shouldn’t interfere with MISO transmission planning.  

“I don’t see such a clear distinction between planning and markets because of how they interact with one another,” Patton responded.