Some stakeholders directed blame this week at Entergy for obstructing grid planning in MISO South.
During a Tuesday meeting of MISO’s Board of Directors, former FERC Commissioner and Iowa Utilities Board Chair John Norris admonished the RTO for not directing meaningful planning and allowing Entergy to influence long-term planning decisions.
Norris said he had reservations when he sided with FERC’s order to approve Entergy’s MISO membership in 2013.
“I must say though, that I did not, nor did my colleagues, suspect that by 2021 no advancement in the regional transmission planning would have taken place,” he said.
Not having expanded the transfer constraint between MISO Midwest and MISO South for more than six years is unacceptable, Norris said. He said the restricted transfer between the regions “begs the question: ‘What’s the point?’”
The long-range transmission plan “is already five years too late,” Norris told MISO board members.
“MISO has to plan the grid that the future needs today,” he said.
Norris said MISO is being “held hostage” by “anti-competitive” MISO South members and has allowed them to grind the long-range transmission plan “to a halt.”
“MISO needs to lead, not be led by members with parochial interests,” he said.
New Orleans-based clean energy consultant Andy Kowalczyk also said MISO South would be better served by RTO-led effective and competitive transmission planning.
“The regional grid should not be built to accommodate the economic self-interest of investor-owned utilities and doing so will not just risk the larger market, it will risk the stability of the grid and public safety by blocking more competitive and/or efficient options,” he told MISO directors.
Kowalczyk said Entergy Louisiana’s grid is both unprepared for a transition to clean energy and extreme weather events. He said he was forced out of his home for several days after Hurricane Ida.
“We’ve been given two warnings about the transmission grid in eight months with extreme weather events in the footprint, three in nearly a year if you count [2020’s] Hurricane Laura,” Kowalczyk said, referencing Hurricane Ida and Winter Storm Uri this year. “If the RTO is not assertive in deploying regional reliability projects for the next 20 years of challenges on the grid, the system will become a symbol for decline.”
This isn’t the first time Entergy has been accused of stalling major MISO transmission planning. Renewable advocates involved in a Mississippi Public Service Commission docket said recently that the state and Entergy Mississippi, the latter threatened by the prospect of competition inching into its territory, deliberately delay large-scale transmission expansion efforts. (See Mississippi PSC Audit Questions MISO Membership.)
Kowalczyk also asked MISO to lead the cost-allocation effort and develop a mechanism that results in “projects being built, not something that checks all the boxes for some utility members.”
Deadlock over Allocation
Members are at a stalemate over how MISO should divide up potentially billions of dollars in its long-range transmission planning construction costs.
Xcel Energy’s Carolyn Wetterlin, chair of MISO’s cost-allocation working group, said stakeholders have not reached consensus on an appropriate cost-sharing plan. She said some believe the grid operator can reuse cost allocation from its 2011 Multi-Value Project (MVP) portfolio while others favor an entirely new plan and want different cost-sharing plans for the Midwest and South regions. Still other stakeholders remain keen on assigning some costs to interconnecting generators hoping for grid treatment.
“[MISO] is in a tough spot, trying to find a balance between those conflicting positions,” Wetterlin told the MISO board Tuesday.
Stakeholders have cautioned the RTO against proposing cost allocations for projects in MISO Midwest that are different from those in MISO South, saying it would effectively create a seam within the footprint. (See MISO Dusts off MVP Cost Allocation for Long-range Tx Plan.)
The grid operator might finalize a cost-allocation proposal for long-range projects sometime in November, drawing on MVP cost-sharing principles.
“The cost allocation, no surprise, remains challenging,” MISO Vice President of System Planning Jennifer Curran said.
She said the stakeholder community is unlikely to be in lockstep on any allocation approach or the project candidates themselves, calling broad consensus “elusive.”
“We remain focused on getting to a least-regrets collection of projects as quickly as we can,” she said. “At some point, more time won’t get us to consensus no matter how much more discussion we have.”
Curran said should MISO decide on a $30 million portfolio, for instance, the projects would be brought forward for approval over the next three to five years.
Insufficient High-voltage
Aubrey Johnson, MISO’s executive director of system planning, said the RTO will have more than 5,000 miles in new transmission lines come online over the next decade that were approved under its previous MISO Transmission Expansion Plan (MTEP) cycles. He said only 232 miles of those new lines will be rated at 345 kV and greater.
On the other hand, Johnson said, all projects in the long-range transmission plan will be 345 kV or higher. He said firm transmission service for resources is crucial to MISO members being able to reliably serve load.
Johnson warned that an Organization of MISO States survey predicting adequate resources in 2022 doesn’t account for extreme weather events. (See 2021 OMS-MISO Resource Adequacy Survey Shows Less Cause for Concern.) Should MISO encounter extreme weather, he said, some local resource zones could be at risk of insufficient resources to serve load.
None of MISO’s long-range transmission projects will make the December cut for MTEP 21. Those projects will come before the board for approval in March at the earliest. (See MISO Targets March Approval for Long-term Tx Projects.) MTEP 21 currently includes 367 projects totaling almost $3.25 billion.
MISO has opened a stakeholder suggestion window for additional long-range projects. Jarred Miland, the RTO’s manager of transmission planning coordination, said staff may face a lot of work in analyzing project proposals.
“Are we going to get five solutions or 572? We’ll see,” Miland said during a long-range transmission workshop last month.
The monthly workshops on the long-range plan have become heated lately. In August, Miland told Bill Booth, a consultant to the Mississippi PSC, that he wouldn’t rehash why staff is conducting a transfer analysis as part of the long-range study.
Miland directed Booth to staff’s underlying reasons for the long-range plan: to support a renewables-heavy fleet and additional electrification, to ward off reliability violations, and to adapt to shifting flow patterns as aging plants retire and members up carbon-reduction goals.
WPPI Energy’s Steve Leovy repeatedly asked why MISO edited a reliability analysis presentation the day before the Aug. 27 meeting.
Staff said the presentation was reposted to correct typos. When Leovy continued to question their reasoning, MISO planners said they would not address it further. Leovy said he was “disrespected” and expected better of the grid operator’s management.
“I think we have a common goal of a safe, reliable transmission system,” WEC Energy Group’s Chris Plante said. “I really want to stress the importance of working together.”
The Union of Concerned Scientists’ Sam Gomberg told Leovy that his and others’ concerns were part of the reason MISO has held the monthly workshops. Gomberg called the meeting frequency an “arbitrary milestone.”
“This sort of hard, last-Friday-of-the-month might be an imposition here,” Gomberg said, suggesting that MISO could sometimes forgo a teleconference and simply post the latest results of analyses for stakeholder review.
Clean Grid Alliance’s Natalie McIntire thanked MISO planners for their “behind-the-scenes” work.
“It’s clear to me that the scope of this study is the largest and most complex scope that MISO’s ever done, larger than the [MVP portfolio],” she said.
