By Amanda Durish Cook

NEW ORLEANS — MISO experienced a quiet winter, aside from early February tornadoes in Louisiana and high congestion charges from a MISO-PJM constraint.

Demand peaked at 100 GW, about 9 GW below MISO’s all-time winter peak during the 2014 polar vortex.

“We had a relatively mild winter and that turns into relatively mild operating conditions,” MISO Executive Director of Market Design Jeff Bladen said during a quarterly operations report at the March 21 Markets Committee of the Board of Directors meeting.

Average LMPs rose to $28/MWh from $21/MWh last year as gas prices rose 55% year-over-year, Markets Committee Chair Paul Bonavia said. He said MISO’s plentiful wind output kept prices from ticking further upward.

Independent Market Monitor David Patton said the most significant event in the quarter was a series of tornadoes in Louisiana on Feb. 7 that resulted in multiple transmission outages and pushed Louisiana Hub prices above $1,000/MWh for three hours. The storms led to $19 million in real-time congestion.

Patton said the storms caused real-time prices to be 30% higher than day-ahead prices for all of February.

“An event like this can cause a huge spike in balancing congestion charges,” Patton said. Balancing congestion charges, which normally average $1 million per month, totaled $11 million.

Bladen said the weather incident caused MISO’s monthly market efficiency metric to increase by $15 million. “The impact was appreciable due to the outages,” Bladen said.

Director Baljit Dail expressed worry that an “act of God” caused such havoc on MISO’s markets, and said the Human Resource Committee of the Board of Directors could look into purchasing insurance against it. “When you consider the world we live in, more of these severe weather events will happen,” he said.

“We certainly do quite a bit to prepare for these severe conditions,” Bladen replied.

Director Michael Curran asked if approved transmission projects in Louisiana would help relieve congestion in future emergency conditions. MISO staff agreed that they would.

Real-time congestion in the quarter increased 48% over last year but dipped 21% when compared to fall, when outage rates were high in MISO South. (See IMM Report Highlights Outages, Wind Over-Forecasting.)

Wind Causes Congestion on PJM Seam

Not all of MISO’s winter real-time congestion could be attributed to severe weather. Most congestion occurred along the MISO-PJM seam and was caused by transmission outages and high wind output, Patton said.

A single MISO-PJM market-to-market constraint alone accounted for $40 million worth of congestion and was “difficult to manage because it is dominated by PJM resources,” Patton said. On Feb. 7 — coincidentally the day of the tornadoes — MISO transferred control of the constraint to PJM, “reducing congestion on the constraint and improving the dispatch,” according to Patton.

The Monitor said he would like to see MISO, PJM and SPP become more active in transferring monitoring of constraints “but it requires agreement and improved processes.” There are a number of cases where the non-monitoring RTO has all of the transmission loading relief on a flowgate, he said.

Patton also said there are several instances in which MISO and a neighboring RTO have to manually control flowgates, which is not as efficient.

“We feel the RTOs should develop better software and procedures” to switch control of the constraint to the RTO with the most relief, Patton said.

A jump in wind production also contributed to higher congestion in the quarter. Wind output rose 21% from the fall and 20% over last winter as MISO set an all-time wind output record of 13.7 GW on Dec. 7, beating the previous 13.3-GW record set in late November.

Patton said wind output contributed to $47 million of real-time congestion costs. He said the increase in wind output was most significant near the MISO-SPP seam where MISO wind resources are plentiful. SPP had difficulties controlling power flows from MISO into SPP.

“We get into situations where it’s difficult because we have a lot of wind resources that whip the flows around,” Patton said, adding that SPP sometimes will control the flows manually, which is more expensive.

“When your neighbor is dominating the constraint, you should hand the constraint over. SPP in particular has been resistant to this. PJM has been more willing to do this than SPP,” Patton said.

He said MISO and SPP should continue to work together to address monitoring control of constraints rather than “abandon economic coordination.”

MISO and SPP are working together on transfers of monitoring control and hope to agree on a smoother process later in the year, MISO staff said.