By Amanda Durish Cook

MISO is embarking on a review of its entire economic planning process in an effort to more accurately capture the benefits of cost-shared transmission projects.

“This is not about MISO saying the existing process is broken or flawed,” Matt Ellis, of the RTO’s Economic Planning Users Group, told stakeholders at a Feb. 13 Planning Subcommittee meeting.

Ellis said MISO is looking forward to FERC-level discussion on best practices for planning and that it will continue to talk about economic models throughout 2018.

MISO especially wants to take a fresh look at:

• The economic impacts of transmission outages;
• Voltage and local reliability resource commitments, especially in MISO South load pockets where performance has lagged;
• MISO’s emergency energy supply and how it’s being valued in economic models when it defers transmission and generation investment or prevents scarcity pricing and loss-of-load events;
• Accounting for likely import and export flows in adjusted production costs; and
• Forecasted renewable resource ownership and which members will actually purchase the energy and benefit when considering renewable portfolio standards.

Further, the RTO plans to hold stakeholder discussions through June on other possible measurable benefits that could be valued in the modeling of market efficiency projects. It could consider such benefits as the deferral of reliability projects; savings that could arise from opening up it contract flow path with SPP that bridges MISO South and Midwest; reduced transmission energy losses; reduced ancillary services costs; and deferral of capacity expansion stemming from increased capacity import/export limits.

Ellis asked for member companies’ engineers to come forward with other ideas about overlooked benefits of market efficiency projects that could be assigned a monetary value.

Minnesota Public Utilities Commission staff member Hwikwon Ham cautioned that renewable standards are set by state legislatures and can be changed. Ellis responded that MISO is looking for that kind of information and other input.

He also said timely changes to MISO’s modeling could affect how it judges potential projects in its annual Market Congestion Planning Study for the 2018 Transmission Expansion Plan.

“We are fully aware that having a process review in parallel with having the process is not an ideal situation. It introduces a lot of ‘what-ifs,’” Ellis said. He promised that MISO would test any projects affected by an economic model change using both the old and new models and that it could delay implementing the new aspects of economic modeling.

MISO announced its plan the same week it proposed to lower the voltage threshold for market efficiency projects to 230 kV, and two weeks after FERC ordered a technical conference on how PJM, MISO and SPP coordinate generator interconnection studies after developer EDF Renewable Energy complained that the RTOs’ modeling standards violate the FERC requirement for transparent open access interconnection service. (See FERC Orders Review of PJM, MISO, SPP Generator Studies.)