MISO is pushing back a restart of its swamped generator interconnection queue by a few months while it tries to study through the backlog with tech company Pearl Street.
The RTO now plans to finish the first phase of studies on the 2022 batch of project proposals before it begins studying the 2023 class in May. It won’t begin analyzing 2025 entrants until the fourth quarter. However, MISO hopes to have all projects striking interconnection agreements over 2026, with the 2022 cycle proceeding in the second quarter, 2023 in the third quarter and 2025 by the end of 2026.
Last year, MISO tentatively scheduled the 2025 cycle of queue projects to begin in the third quarter. It also said it would begin studying the 123 GW of 2023 interconnection requests in February. (See 2023 Queue Cycle Delayed into 2025 as MISO Seeks Software Help on Studies.)
MISO skipped acceptance of a 2024 queue class altogether. The RTO hasn’t processed a new queue cycle in more than a year, saying it needs to introduce study automation and implement a megawatt cap to make processing requests less daunting. (See MISO to Skip 2024 Queue Cycle While it Automates Study Process with Tech Startup.)
It is betting that Pittsburgh-based tech startup Pearl Street’s SUGAR (Suite of Unified Grid Analyses with Renewables) can get its overtaxed queue down to a one-year process.
Pearl Street and MISO are automating several aspects of the queue, including the studies that select network upgrades and estimate costs, study reports, and the process behind power flow model building, dispatching and solving.
In a teleconference Jan. 28, MISO’s Ryan Westphal told the Interconnection Process Working Group that the RTO is “testing and getting things tuned in” on the automated work.
Westphal said that while MISO and Pearl Street have made “significant progress” on implementing SUGAR, they “need a little more time” to refine the process and make it more user friendly as stakeholders have requested.
He said that by Feb. 10, MISO will begin using Pearl Street in earnest on the proposals that entered the queue in 2022. It hopes to finish the first phase of interconnection studies for the 2022 cycle by early May.
Westphal said MISO is choosing to complete the 2022 cycle’s first phase studies before it starts on 2023’s class to limit ambiguity in study results. He said a prior cycle’s resources become assumptions in future study cycles, so MISO should avoid study overlap. The sheer size of the 2022 and 2023 queue cycles — 171 GW and 123 GW, respectively — also makes some separation a wise call.
“The 2022 cycle is large, as everyone remembers, so it’s really prudent to get it through the queue,” Westphal said.
Westphal said at this point, MISO plans to kick off the 2022 cycle on Feb. 10 and the 2023 cycle on May 5. The RTO hopes the technology can help it shrink the first phase of studies to 90 days.
It further estimates that SUGAR will reduce time spent on the 2022 and 2023 cycles by anywhere from 270 to 365 days, a “massive engineering time savings.”
“We have to move through the backlog to get through to the place we want to be,” Westphal said. He predicted “a lot of work” and MISO continuing to process simultaneous cycles until it can cut its queue down to a one-year interconnection process.
“We think that SUGAR gives us the best chance to do that,” Westphal said. “We’re hoping this is a big piece of us being able to achieve a one-year queue process.”
The RTO also hopes that SUGAR can speed up the first phase of interconnection studies in particular so its engineers can devote more attention to the more intricate, back-end studies of the queue, Westphal said.
