By Amanda Durish Cook

NEW ORLEANS — MISO’s Steering Committee last week said it needs more time to decide whether the stakeholder-led Energy Storage Task Force can deliberate on how the RTO can comply with FERC’s sweeping storage order issued in March.

Established last year, the task force was charged with exploring expanded storage participation in MISO, including generator-and-storage interconnection combinations and competitive bidding on storage projects that solve transmission issues. However, the task force has not assumed it could begin considering expanded storage rules as they specifically relate to last month’s Order 841. (See MISO Storage Task Force Talks Order 841.)

MISO’s task forces do not determine stakeholder policy; instead, they submit recommendations to other committees with decision-making authority, such as the Advisory Committee. The Energy Storage Task Force has already sent several discussion topics — including storage capacity accreditation, must-offer requirements, state-of-charge management, possible aggregation and new modeling needs — to MISO’s Resource Adequacy Subcommittee, Reliability Subcommittee, Planning Advisory Committee and Market Subcommittee.

“My initial response is that this task force was created prior to Order 841,” Steering Committee Chair Tia Elliott said during a March 28 meeting.

Task force Chair John Fernandes said his group will have plenty of issues to discuss even if the committee decides against assigning it Order 841. The group can hold dialogue on operational functions, customer-owned storage assets and modeling issues — including whether storage should be modeled in MISO’s yearly Transmission Expansion Plan process or the interconnection queue, he said.

“I don’t necessarily have it in my mind that the task force will go away,” Fernandes said.

As an interim measure, FERC last week approved a second MISO storage definition, allowing storage to participate in front of the meter to supply energy, capacity, spinning reserve, supplemental reserve and regulating reserve. (See FERC OKs MISO Plan to Expand Storage.) However, the commission also determined that MISO had to address other storage participation rules, namely creating unique bidding parameters for storage resources, a path for storage to receive make-whole payments and an outline detailing how storage could provide voltage support and black start services. It ordered the RTO to devise those rules in a compliance filing.