MISO’s market platform upgrade project is $20 million over budget as staff and vendors navigate the intricacies of replacing a decades-old system and pandemic-related supply chain issues.

The project’s costs have risen to nearly $160 million, up from the $140 million projected last year. MISO Executive Director of Digital Strategy Jeff Bladen said the increase is largely because of the complexities of swapping out system components that couldn’t be foreseen two years ago.

Speaking during Thursday’s Market Subcommittee meeting, Bladen also said implementing MISO’s new private cloud server was held up by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic’s interruptions of the supply chain. The new private cloud will house the modular platform, replacing the current server-based platform. (See Test Phase Approaches for MISO Market Platform.)

“We are moving ahead,” Bladen said. “We have been impacted by that to some degree in the buildout of the private cloud.”

Bladen said the private cloud will probably be online later this month, a month later than the RTO anticipated pre-pandemic.

MISO Director Baljit Dail said that even with the cost increase of the project, the cost-benefit is “still significant.”

“I think it’s important to remember that the legacy system was installed in 2009. It’s over a decade old,” Dail said at MISO’s June board meeting. He said staff stretched the original platform as far as they could, adding software and market products to keep up with a changing grid.

Bladen said the existing system’s architecture was originally designed for PJM in the mid-1990s.

MISO is replacing the platform gradually, turning off core elements of the old system one at a time and replacing them with new microservers. The day-ahead market is set to go live on the new platform in 2023.

“We’ve started down this path in earnest, with actual coding as we speak,” Bladen told stakeholders.

The old market platform will be completely retired in 2026. However, the bulk of the replacement will be complete by late 2024, Bladen said. The real-time market will likely go live on the new platform in early 2025.

Additionally, the new market participant interface test environment has been open since April and will be until June 2021. Parallel operations of the new and old interfaces will take place July-October 2021.

“We have seen some traffic and activity, but several companies have not tested it yet,” MISO Senior IT Director Curtis Reister said.