MISO has agreed to pay an $815,000 penalty for a pair of NERC violations committed over the summer.
MISO Vice President of Operations Renuka Chatterjee said MISO addressed the issues quickly while self-reporting them to ReliabilityFirst’s enforcement group. The grid operator agreed to ReliabilityFirst’s non-negotiable settlement proposal in late August.
Chatterjee said ReliabilityFirst determined the severity of the violations, and MISO would have faced a higher penalty if it hadn’t admitted the violations.
“MISO agreed to settle and admit the violations to minimize risk of increased penalty amount for MISO stakeholders,” Chatterjee said at an Oct. 18 Advisory Committee teleconference.
MISO said both incidents violated standard IRO-008-2, which governs operational analyses and real-time assessments.
MISO reported it discovered missing data while it was updating models in its day-ahead analysis for an unspecified day. The data is tied to contingency scenarios the RTO runs to prepare for the next operating day.
The second breach came when MISO discovered it lapsed in monitoring a 115-kV tie-line because it had been erroneously marked as external to the grid operator. MISO said it corrected the issue and has since implemented a procedure to reflect a change in seasonal ownership of the constraint.
“An after-the-fact analysis with updated ratings also showed that this non monitoring did not represent a system operating limit violation,” MISO added.
ReliabilityFirst has forwarded the penalty agreement to NERC for approval. The agreement then goes before FERC for authorization.
After FERC approval of the agreement, MISO will make a section 205 filing to recover the penalty from market participants. MISO said it anticipates FERC will issue an order on the settlement in late November or early December. In the anticipated timeline, MISO said it will recover the penalty sometime in the first half of 2024.
MISO said it maintained reliable operations throughout both events. The grid operator said, “at no time was there any harm to the bulk electric system.”
