States must prioritize transmission modernization and expansion to ensure a reliable, affordable, and resilient energy future, but much of the transmission grid is regulated at the regional and federal levels. It’s important that states are able to engage with other stakeholders to maneuver the regional transmission landscape and ensure regional planning meets state-level climate and energy needs.
For this webinar in our Transmission Series, we examined a case study of one region’s transmission planning: the electric grid operator for the central United States, MISO. We invited a panel of experts to explore lessons learned from MISO’s Long Range Transmission Planning process, including how state energy goals can drive transmission planning, what roles different stakeholders have in RTO processes, and more.
Our expert panel included:
- Matt Prorok, Policy Director, Energy Systems at the Great Plains Institute
- Benjamin Stafford, Senior Policy Manager, Energy Systems at the Great Plains Institute
- Beth Soholt, Executive Director of the Clean Grid Alliance
- Andy Kowalczyk, Transmission Director at the Southern Renewable Energy Association
The Case for Long-Range Transmission
Learn more by watching the webinar at 12:33
As both policy and market forces increasingly call for decarbonized electricity and energy needs soar due to increased demands from manufacturing, data centers, and other large-load facilities, new transmission infrastructure is critical to deliver clean, reliable, and affordable energy.
When states started enacting renewable portfolio standards (RPSs) in the late 2000s, utilities in the Midwest began working together to plan out the infrastructure upgrades needed to meet those standards. This resulted in the buildout of MISO’s Multi-Value Projects (MVPs), a 17-line portfolio designed to move wind power from the west to the east, which was one of the nation’s first backbone transmission expansion project — a marker of an important shift from how transmission was historically built.
In the past, power plants were sited close to demand centers and transmission lines were built to connect with neighboring facilities. Now, long-range interconnection is much more important, as our system relies more significantly on resources that may be more remote and variable, like many renewables. It also requires more sharing of resources, especially with increasingly frequent and devastating natural disasters. During Winter Storm Uri, which caused near-catastrophic grid emergencies in much of the middle of the country in 2021, the regional transmission organizations (RTOs) were able to work together and utilize the MVPs to move power east to west, avoiding grid outages.
The Role of RTOs and Stakeholder Engagement
Learn more by watching the webinar at 19:27
Regional transmission organizations (RTOs) and independent system operators (ISOs) are responsible for planning and operating the transmission systems that deliver over 70 percent of electricity across the country. These entities have distinct and complex stakeholder engagement processes involving power producers, transmission infrastructure owners, environmental and public consumer advocates, state regulators, and others. For the Midcontinent ISO (MISO), this is organized as a stakeholder committee that casts votes and submits comments which then advise — but do not mandate — changes to proposed processes. Politics and culture certainly play a role in the influence of different stakeholders: transmission owners and state regulators often have more sway, and it’s important to understand and strategize within these power dynamics.
State Engagement with MISO’s Long Range Transmission Planning
Learn more by watching the webinar at 31:15
After the approval of MISO’s MVPs in 2011, almost a decade went by with failed attempts to complete another round of transmission expansion, as there were no clear, consistent drivers of need. This changed around 2019, when state and utility clean energy goals ramped up, as they had before with the first round of RPSs in the 2000s. As MISO built out their future energy scenarios, they saw a step change in projected renewable generation expansion that called for a more robust planning process — what later became MISO’s Long Range Transmission Planning (LRTP) process.
The first tranche of 17 LRTP projects were approved by August 2022 with the goal of creating and reinforcing the “reliable achievement” of the policy objectives held by states and utilities. The projects were largely driven by: renewable portfolio and clean energy standards; the decreasing cost of wind, solar, and storage; and increasing demand for clean energy from corporate buyers.
Tranche 2.1 was approved in December 2024, with utilities responding to increased clean energy targets and working with states to build consensus on regional transmission planning needs. Additionally, increasingly frequent severe weather events have made it clear to stakeholders that it’s essential to invest in long-range transmission to ensure grid reliability.
MISO’s southern states have not been included in either of the LRTP Tranches to date, in part due to differences in regional energy politics. The need for transmission planning is less clear in states without renewable portfolio standards, and outreach to state regulators in the south has not effectively communicated how the benefits outweigh the costs, both of which are in the billions of dollars.
Q&A
Learn more by watching the webinar at 49:19
Q: Is there evidence that these transmission lines are leading to lower costs for the average ratepayer? It seems that utility bills are increasing across the country and that transmission projects are one of the primary reasons. When do these projects deliver economic benefits to ratepayers?
Beth Soholt: You have to imagine a scenario where you don’t have the transmission, and what if you need to add new generation, what would the cost of that new generation be? Or, what would the cost of your choices forr new generation be? The transmission we’ve built enables multiple things, but one of the things we take into consideration is where the best renewable energy resources are located. So the transmission is allowing access to lowest cost new resources.
So, when I look at my transmission bill, I’m in Minnesota, and Excel Energy services about 50 percent of the state. There’s three components to my bill: generation, distribution, and transmission. Transmission is about 12 percent of my bill, they actually break it out at Excel. Distribution is less than generation, but generation is maybe 49% percent or so. Distribution is the rest, and transmission is 12 percent. But the point is, transmission is not the big investment. The billions of dollars come when you make the generation choice. So your bill is lower than it would have been if a utility had to choose higher cost generation to serve load. That assumes a lot of things, but that’s kind of how I look at it, as it would have been more, but you can’t really see that. You see your bills going up because we’re making investments in this large, long lived infrastructure. But at some point it should level off, because if we invest in renewable energy, you’re not going to have the same operation and maintenance cost. The fuel is free, so it’s going to level off after you pay off the capital costs. So those are a couple of things that go into how we factor in and how we look at it from a regulatory perspective. The regulators in regulated states are still looking to make sure these are prudent investments for ratepayers, but that’s my take.
Benjamin Stafford: Even in the states that are unbundled, or I think, this is me being precise, probably too much, but I think “deregulated” is a term that’s not necessarily accurate. It’s just a different form of regulation. But the states that have unbundled some of these services, like in the PJM footprint, they also have set offices in their state regulators to track whether those benefits are actually happening.
So when Ohio chose to seed a lot of its generation to competitive resources at that level, they also required an office to monitor that to make sure it’s actually delivering benefits. There’ve been studies about what’s been coming online with what the RPS is, in those regional grids and pretty much across the board, lowering net costs. That doesn’t mean that they will stay there at all times, and it all depends on where you sit. I will also say, if you sit in a constrained area, any transmission helps, and that is going to lower your transmission and your generation bill, pretty extremely.
And, interestingly enough, those high congestion points, those pain points in the grid, they’re supposed to be expensive. They’re supposed to because they’re supposed to attract new investment. So it’s kind of built into this idea that if you’re more expensive, where you sit, if transmission planning and investment is going right, that’s supposed to help solve itself. But you need this advocacy. You need the objectives to come into place to make that happen. So to quote the Canadian philosopher Avril Lavigne, “Why’d you have to go and make things so complicated?” That’s the way RTOs and ISOs are, but in their intent, they should be attracting investment to the right places. Transmission lowers both the transmission portion of your bill and the generation portion of your bill, if it’s working well, and you need advocates to make sure it’s working well.
Matt Prorok: One more point to make here quickly is that not all transmission is the same. And I kind of shared that picture at first, of the whole country, and articulated that a lot of that was built, kind of what I might call, bottom up. Or, “Hey, I need to hook up a new power plant, or my neighbor’s power plant has some spare capacity, so if I run a small line together, we can share.” But that’s not the type of transmission that is needed to enable the type of transformation that we’re talking about today. And quite frankly, the business models and the regulatory constructs, in some ways, are set up to make it easier to plan and build the more localized transmission than it is to plan and build the regional and interregional transmission.
And just to Benjamin’s point, you need advocates and states in this space to drive transparency and ensure that the planning is really driving the most value for customers across the region and across the country. Part of that is recognizing that what we need today isn’t really what we needed yesterday, and the results of planning need to acknowledge the trade-off we have. We have limited dollars to invest overall in infrastructure. We should try to direct those dollars into the greatest value return that we can get from those investments.
Q: What would your recommendation be to an advocate, state representative, or state commissioner, commission staff to make their engagement in their respective state or regional transmission planning process as effective as possible? Is there a specific strategy or something to focus on that you would recommend for them?
Beth Soholt: That’s a tough one, because it really depends on where you sit, and what resources you have to engage. Is there somebody that you can find, that you trust to educate you on these issues, to dip your toe into the water? Is it a colleague? Do you have to take a leap and cold call somebody who you’ve seen on these issues? Find somebody who looks like a trusted advisor on these and pick their brain. Or ask current advocates how they’re doing it.
One thing you’ll find in this industry, and probably in a lot of others, is that we’re all glad to talk about our work. And so, if you ask for a consultation with somebody about, how are you doing this, or how do you do this, or what are your thoughts, or whatever. We’re all very open to doing that. So you have to be able to sustain a presence in the stakeholder process for a while. If you’re just trying to dip in and out, that’s very difficult, maybe you can follow one issue, but if you’re really going to engage in a lot of different ones, you need to have some staying power and be able to go to meetings and participate in whatever feedback loop there is and establish those relationships.
Andy Kowalczyk: I totally agree. I think that for commissions and commission staff, find fellow regulators and fellow staff that are highly engaged and are fired up about these things. You’ll get a lot better information and get some regulatory perspective too to help in your journey of really understanding where you fit in and what your priorities are, or how your state’s priorities line up with efforts within the RTO. And maybe diversity too, trying to get more than just one perspective on things.
I think that — and there may be even a tendency to do this within the environmental sector — we check ourselves quite often with not trying to be one too much of one thing, rather than getting a more fulsome kind of picture. I think we’re really good at that actually. But there are some stakeholders I think that kind of stick to one corner, and that’s not good.
Benjamin Stafford: I couldn’t agree more with the keep showing up, building relationships, because this really is a relationship business. And the committees evolve from relationships the way the discussions evolved from relationships, and you’d be surprised that like all of us showed up vulnerable to this at some point and did not know what we’re doing. Now we’re trying to convince you we do know, we’re running a webinar, but it’s one of the things that we did when I was a state commission staffer. When people showed up and they didn’t know how we worked, the first thing we said was, “Thank you, you’re here,” and that’s what matters. And so, keep showing up and find someone that says “Thank you for being here, I’d love to make sure that you’re involved and that you’re able to learn, and your voice is heard.” It’s not easy. The vocab is specific, but you’re not going to do that without being vulnerable.
Q: Who is building the transmission lines within MISO once the RTO level planning has identified necessary projects?
Matt Prorok: MISO issues a “notice to construct” for each project. Depending on the state the project is in, it will either be directly assigned to the incumbent Transmission Owner (utility) or be competitively bid on by other third party transmission developers.
Q: How does MISO’s long range transmission planning take into account new renewable generation? How reactive or proactive was the process in prioritizing where renewable generation should be sited?
Matt Prorok: It’s both proactive and reactive. They look at the current interconnection queue as an indication of where new generation development is occurring. They primarily look at the aggregate needs of their member utilities (i.e. how much wind and solar do they plan to build over the next 20 years) and use those as the primary input to plan transmission around.
Q: News reports over the last two years imply that the connection queues are continually getting worse, seemingly across the whole country. Is this true, and if so, where is the bottleneck coming from? Is it the ISOs/RTOs or permitting?
Matt Prorok: It is true that interconnection queues have grown, as have backlogs. In part this is because of the growth in development pressure. It’s also due to lack of available transmission capacity to quickly and affordably interconnect those resources. There are also a number of reforms to interconnection study processes themselves to speed up processing times.
* The views and opinions expressed by our guest speakers during the webinar and summarized in this article are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Climate XChange.
