MISO said its nine-year effort to replace its market platform will exceed original budget contingencies and will not be completed until 2028, three years later than it previously predicted.

Chief Digital and Information Officer Nirav Shah said at a Sept. 4 meetup of the MISO Board of Directors’ Technology Committee that the RTO now expects the full integration of a new, real-time market clearing engine to extend into 2028.

In early 2024, MISO expected to have all projects associated with its new, modular market platform fully operational in late 2025. When MISO announced the project in 2017, it estimated it could migrate to the new modular computer system by 2023. (See New MISO Day-ahead Market Engine to Emerge Soon After Delay and MISO Sets Sights on 2025 Completion for New Market Platform.)

Shah said the overall cost of the platform overhaul has increased to about $175 million “due to the complexity of completing the real-time market clearing engine.” He said he would have more details on the higher costs of the project later in 2025. MISO originally allotted $130 million for the platform swap with a 25% contingency.

“I look back to 2017, and we’re in a very different place. A lot has changed,” Shah explained. He said technology functions differently now than when MISO announced the replacement project nine years ago. He also said FERC has released several orders with new requirements in that time frame, such as real-time ambient-adjusted line ratings under Order 881.

Shah said that overall, requirements on the market platform replacement are 11% higher than when MISO first gauged them.

“It’s a pretty disappointing miss this late in the project,” said Director Todd Raba, who added that “one of these days,” he’d like to see an IT project end on time and on budget.

Director Theresa Wise said the market platform replacement can be thought of as “a series of projects over time,” with the final projects having vastly different parameters than MISO originally anticipated. Wise said the last two projects are significantly larger with more requirements.

“I think we’re clouding things together,” Wise said in defense of the project’s progress.

Shah said vendors originally estimated the look-ahead commitment component of the project to be about $7 million in 2017. The effort now is predicted to cost about $16 million. He also said the new unit dispatch system has gone from an $8 million estimate to more than $18 million.

MISO CEO John Bear said the RTO probably should have “recast” and repriced the remaining elements of the platform replacement around 2021 to capture rising technological complexities and inflation.

“We didn’t do that, and I want to apologize for that. … Time is not your friend on these projects,” Bear said.

Bear, however, stood by the project even with the late-stage additional costs.

“If you step back from this … the value from the project is still there, even with the increases. The benefits overall are going to be enormous,” Bear said.

For nearly a decade, MISO leadership has said that the current, monolithic market platform — built using technology from the 1990s — is poised to become so obsolete that it won’t be able to clear the day-ahead market or accommodate the more scattered, numerous generation assets that the fleet transition has introduced. (See MISO Makes Case for $130M Market Platform Upgrade.)

Director Erik Takayesu asked if the vendors on the market platform replacement are taking responsibility for some overages. The replacement is being completed with vendors General Electric and Siemens.

“We absolutely are pushing back on the vendors,” Shah said. He said that, for instance, MISO refused to take on additional costs of “poor architecture decisions” that necessitated a redesign on some of the look-ahead commitment components.

“It absolutely is making them uncomfortable, but that’s the right thing for our stakeholders,” Shah said.

MISO estimated it will take until 2026 for the look-ahead commitment software to enter final testing and parallel operations. By 2027, the RTO estimates it would be able to test its new unit dispatch system and enter it into parallel operations.

Through the remainder of 2025, MISO plans to begin testing the look-ahead commitment software and launch its new one-stop model manager so it can cease operations of its old, siloed modeling systems. Shah said MISO had to work through some data quality issues as it migrated data to the new management system. The RTO’s model manager project aims for one system of record for all planning and operations models to eliminate redundant data entry and review.

MISO also said the technology to use real-time AARs is in the testing stages for the remainder of 2025, with production still on track for 2026.

Over 2024, the RTO entered its new day-ahead market clearing engine into standalone production and retired its legacy day-ahead market.