By Amanda Durish Cook

CARMEL, Ind. — MISO easily managed what turned out to be a “near-normal” March, the RTO said Tuesday.

The RTO’s load averaged 71.1 GW for the month, in line with the 70.8 GW average a year earlier. But the 85.3 GW monthly peak set on March 14 came up 2.5 GW short of last March’s peak.

During an April 24 Informational Forum, MISO reported relatively mild weather in most of the footprint during March, although cold conditions persisted in parts of MISO Midwest.

“I would say winter just won’t go away this year,” observed MISO Senior Director of Systemwide Operations Rob Benbow, who added that lower temperatures kept demand relatively low during the month.

“We did see a lot of diversity in our weather footprint,” Benbow said, noting that one day in March saw snowstorms up north while parts of MISO South were under tornado warnings.

“When you span that far across the United States, you expect that,” he added.

Real-time prices in March were about 14% lower than they were last year, averaging $25.40/MWh, while day-ahead averaged $25.55/MWh.

Benbow said the price drop was due to lower congestion and natural gas prices compared with last year. Gas prices in March averaged $2.48/MMBtu at Chicago Citygate and $2.66/MMBtu at Henry Hub, down from $2.84/MMBtu and $2.83/MMBtu, respectively.

Benbow said the month brought the usual onset of generation maintenance outages, with planned outages doubling to about 25 GW as February transitioned into March.

MISO also set a new, 15.6-GW record peak for wind generation on March 31, toppling its previous 15-GW wind record set in January.

Queue Progress

MISO also provided an update on its interconnection queue, with Benbow saying completion of affected systems studies continue to slow queue progress, a topic debated in early April at a FERC technical conference. (See Renewable Gens Face Off with RTOs at Seams Tech Conference.)

MISO’s generator interconnection queue currently includes 561 projects, totaling 93.1 GW, and the April 2018 definitive planning phase queue cycle added 244 projects, representing 41.2 GW.

MISO said it is managing 14 ongoing queue cycles with five more queue cycles set to begin in the coming months. The lion’s share of the queue is renewable generation, with 42.7 GW of wind, 37.4 GW of solar and 12.3 GW of natural gas generation.