Members of the Organization of MISO States are divided on whether the organization should register comments in a FERC complaint that could fundamentally change the way MISO can plan its long-view transmission.
The rift among the states shows how contentious the late July complaint is.
The public service commissions of North Dakota, Montana, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas have sought reclassification of MISO’s $22 billion, mostly 765-kV second long-range transmission portfolio and have contested the RTO’s business case for the lines through a FERC complaint. The complaint could have FERC halting a regional cost-sharing of the lines across MISO Midwest and could upend MISO’s long-range planning process. (See Five Republican States File FERC Complaint to Undercut $22B MISO Long-range Tx Plan.)
FERC has allowed MISO until Sept. 9 to respond to the complaint, 10 days shorter than the monthlong extension MISO originally requested. (See MISO Requests Month to Respond to States’ Long-range Tx Complaint.)
Organization of MISO States Executive Director Tricia DeBleeckere said the complaint positions OMS in a tough spot because five OMS members lodged the complaint in the first place.
DeBleeckere suggested that OMS refrain from filing comments in the docket but said she would defer to what a majority of members want.
OMS President Asks States to Back MISO Planning
Joseph Sullivan, president of the Organization of MISO States and vice chair of the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission, said he’d like to see OMS membership who didn’t bring the complaint file comments defending MISO’s planning process.
“I would like to see if we can get to a majority to file comments in support of the process. Now, there are different ways to do cost-benefit calculations. But this is coming nine months after MISO approved the lines in December 2024 and more than a year and a half after it was clear that this would be the approach,” Sullivan told other regulators at an Aug. 14 OMS Board of Directors meeting.
Sullivan said regulators should remember that the lines are meant to accommodate load growth and economic development while modernizing the MISO system. He said even if the ensuing portfolio isn’t exactly what some states had in mind, MISO states agreed to the MISO process. He added that MISO is an outlier among other RTOs for successfully planning long-range transmission.
“We are the only region that succeeds at this, and that’s because we are working together. [That’s] in no small part because of OMS,” he said.
Sullivan pointed out that OMS in 2019 adopted principles on how MISO should approach long-range transmission planning and followed up in 2021 with a cost-allocation principles document and a filing in support of MISO’s postage-stamp-to-load allocation design. He said MISO’s resulting, second long-range portfolio is “consistent” with the OMS principles.
Sullivan said the five states’ request that MISO going forward submit future long-range transmission business cases to FERC for approval would be “a pretty significant federal takeover of state resource adequacy and utility planning in the modern age.”
“A purist may say ‘not so,’ but in the age of RTOs, that is exactly what this is. We all rely on each other and having the FERC say yes or no is something we should push back vigorously on. Fundamentally, this process is the culmination of the MISO stakeholder process and the aggregation of state and utility resource plans,” he said.
Sullivan said he hoped the remaining OMS members could band together in opposition against the complaint. He said OMS members should all be thinking about the “practical knock-on-effects” should FERC grant the complaint.
The second long-range portfolio already is included in all MISO modeling, Sullivan said, including expedited transmission project review, the 2022 cycle of generator interconnection requests and the interconnection queue fast lane.
“So, there will be major upheavals impacting potentially hundreds of projects, many already approved by our commissions. … Because this filing was so late in the process, it will have massive effects on everything we have already done — much of it to meet the moment on artificial intelligence, data centers, load growth and re-industrialization,” Sullivan warned.
Wisconsin Public Service Commissioner Marcus Hawkins said he would support a majority OMS filing on the complaint, or a filing from a subset of MISO states.
States that brought the complaint forward opposed a majority filing from OMS in the docket.
Barton Norfleet, counsel for the Mississippi Public Service Commission, said he thought OMS should sit this docket out. Noel Darce, counsel for the Louisiana Public Service Commission, also agreed that comments should come from individual states, not the organization itself.
South Dakota Public Utilities Commissioner Chris Nelson said his commission is holding off on communicating a position on the complaint and would weigh making a filing once MISO has responded.
“This is a really divisive issue,” Nelson said.
North Dakota Public Service Commissioner Jill Kringstad said North Dakota has long communicated its disillusionment with the MISO portfolio. She said North Dakota is exercising its right to have FERC take an “objective” view at the long-range transmission.
Sullivan said he thought states and OMS board members should “find the common denominator over the next couple of weeks and develop a set of baseline comments defending the process.”
