CARMEL, Ind. — MISO is poised to eliminate its emergency demand response participation option, framing it as a clunky and scarcely used source of emergency assistance. 

“This is an instrument that has been little used … and doesn’t have a lot of operator confidence around it, and therefore it will be retired from the MISO market systems,” MISO’s Mike Robinson said at a Nov. 7 Market Subcommittee meeting.  

MISO established emergency DR around 2007 to better compensate emergency resources. Robinson said emergency DR is called up in the latter stages of an emergency, after load-modifying resources and just prior to involuntary load curtailment. He said emergency DRs are relatively expensive, while load-modifying resources are price-takers and adequately cover MISO’s emergency needs. 

“These are not capacity resources; they’re not obligated to respond to capacity events,” he explained of emergency DRs. 

Robinson said MISO has called on emergency DR just once in its history to manage a transmission emergency from a transformer failure about a decade ago in southwestern Wisconsin.  

Since then, Robinson said, MISO operators occasionally have looked for emergency DR to manage situations but have found none to be available in the moment. Complicating matters, Robinson said a master list of emergency DR resources is maintained in a spreadsheet.  

“Operators have little confidence in them,” he said. “It’s a tool in the tool chest, you might say, but if you don’t use it, why have it?” 

Robinson described emergency DRs by invoking Jean-Baptiste Say’s phrase that “supply creates its own demand” from his 1803 book, “A Treatise on Political Economy; or The Production, Distribution and Consumption of Wealth.”  

MISO hopes to eradicate emergency DRs with FERC permission sometime in the first quarter of 2025.