Stakeholders Surprised at Integrated Roadmap Changes

MISO plans to revise its Integrated Roadmap process, the ongoing five-year workplan that prioritizes and tracks progress on market improvements.

The grid operator is doing away with a stakeholder ranking of improvements. Additionally, it will now accept suggestions for improvements on RTO operations year-round instead of imposing an annual deadline. MISO usually closes a submission window late in the year and begins prioritizing issues early the following year.

Stakeholders attending Wednesday’s Market Subcommittee meeting said they weren’t notified that MISO would change the process so dramatically. They said staff should have approached them during earlier subcommittee meetings to discuss the change before their announcement.

MISO’s head of stakeholder relations, Bob Kuzman, said executives will deliver a more in-depth briefing on the changes during next week’s Board Week.

Low Numbers for New Member Interface

MISO customers are slowly migrating to the new market user interface. Only 24 of 294 customers have fully migrated to the new system, with another 86 in the process.

“We are making very slow progress towards the migration,” said Arijit Bhowmik, MISO director of real-time applications.

The RTO’s revamp of is market interface ― where participants submit bids and offers ― is part of its market platform replacement.

MISO will retire its legacy system on Jan. 18. It began a four-month parallel operations phase on Sept. 8.

MISO’s short-term reserve product, which is set to go live on Tuesday, relies on the new market user interface. Short-term reserves are meant to supply energy within 30 minutes.

MISO: Member Privacy Trumps Zonal Data Sharing

In responding to stakeholders’ requests for access to seven-day load forecasts in their local balancing authority or resource zones, staff said they could publish weekly load forecasting data, but only on a subregional basis.

MISO’s Congcong Wang said the RTO has a few local BAs that rely on just one or two suppliers. Divulging load data for those areas would display confidential information, she said.

Wang said staff can share its load data broken down to MISO South and the North and Central portions of MISO Midwest.

Some customers have asked for access to seven-day load forecasting data at the local BA or local resource-zone levels. (See “Tx Customers Ask for Additional Load-forecasting Data,” MISO Market Subcommittee Briefs: Oct. 7, 2021.)

Most RTOs make load forecasting data for the coming week available to their members, though the level of detail varies.