By Rich Heidorn Jr. CARY, N.C. — PJM CEO Andy Ott and SPP CEO Nick Brown said last week that FERC Order 1000 is causing their staffs headaches while doing little to encourage transmission development. Nick Brown | © Cassondra Wilson, SAS Institute Inc. “I think the driver behind Order...

CARMEL, Ind. — MISO spent $1.3 million to evaluate construction bids in its first competitive transmission process, including administrative costs for issuing the request for proposals and drafting a post-selection report. Pederson | © RTO Insider The work was funded entirely by the 11 developers that submitted proposals. Brian Pedersen,...

By Robert Mullin CAISO’s Board of Governors last week approved a proposal designed to prevent smaller transmission owners from footing the costs for network upgrades needed to interconnect generation serving load outside of their service territories. Valley Electric Association serves about 18,000 customers in a sparsely populated region along the...

By Amanda Durish Cook CARMEL, Ind. — Preliminary results of MISO and SPP’s 2016 coordinated system study are in, and the RTOs say one South Dakota project has potential even though it fails MISO’s $5 million interregional cost threshold. Lopez | © RTO Insider Davey Lopez, MISO advisor of planning...

By Amanda Durish Cook CARMEL, Ind. — The futures assumptions for MISO’s 2017 Transmission Expansion Plan are finalized, with the RTO granting its South region a different future weighting in one study. MISO will use a 40% weighting for an existing trends future, 40% for policy regulations future and 20%...

By Rory D. Sweeney PJM is responding to permitting delays for a 500-kV transmission line across the James River by instituting a multilayered strategy that could cost ratepayers in Virginia’s middle peninsula. The Surry-Skiffes Creek line was proposed to maintain grid reliability on the peninsula after Dominion Energy complies on...

By Wayne Barber Electric infrastructure projects, even those that promote renewable power, are often stymied by federal regulatory reviews that seem to drag on forever, witnesses told the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on March 14. Many speakers called for a single agency to play a lead role...

VALLEY FORGE, Pa. — PJM’s Asanga Perera came to last week’s Market Implementation Committee meeting prepared to seek forgiveness. But instead of mea culpa, his message was: “Help Wanted.” Perera | © RTO Insider PJM’s Tariff requires that it post monthly financial transmission rights auction results within five days, but a...

VALLEY FORGE, Pa. — General assumptions regarding winter operations will need to be replaced with actual data to improve PJM’s winter resource adequacy analysis, staff told the Planning Committee last week. “There’s a propensity for our load model to under-forecast the winter load,” PJM’s Tom Falin said. “This is of...

The odds of SPP and MISO conducting a second joint study dropped last week with the announcement that the RTOs’ respective regional reviews are not lining up as expected. [caption id="attachment_30780" align="alignright" width="200"] Bell © RTO Insider[/caption] The two RTOs had hoped to conduct a broad joint study starting as...