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Historic grid expansion plans are progressing in the central United States

Historic grid expansion plans are progressing in the central United States

Construction of nearly $40 billion in new high-voltage transmission lines in the central U.S. took a step forward this week as regional grid operators covering more than two dozen states laid out plans to meet rising electricity demand and support the transition to enable cleaner energy.

The Southwest Power Pool (SPP) Board of Directors voted a. with an overwhelming majority $7.68 billion transfer plan Tuesday — the largest collection of projects approved by the regional grid operator in his 20 years as transmission planning coordinator for the Great Plains region.

In the East, a board committee of the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) heard strong support — and some opposition — for a historic system proposal $30 billion transfer portfolioMost of it is aimed at developing a high-voltage backbone for the region’s power grid.

In particular, the $21.8 billion portfolio of long-distance transmission projects in the MISO plan is in response to a major overhaul of the region’s power generation fleet. This is due in part to climate legislation recently passed in Illinois, Michigan and Minnesota aimed at transitioning away from fossil fuels.

But the plan also aims to bolster reliability in the region by enabling interstate power transmissions that help protect against extreme weather conditions — exactly the kind of forward-thinking planning the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission envisioned when it previously launched its landmark regulation of 1920 passed this year.

“This is exactly the type of long-term planning that FERC wants,” said Bob McKee, director of strategic projects and execution at American Transmission, a transmission system operator based in Wisconsin.

Other utilities that own transmission systems expressed support for MISO’s long-term plan, including Xcel Energy, Great River Energy, Ameren and ITC. They were joined by representatives from state utility commissions in Minnesota, Iowa and Michigan; environmental groups; and tech giant Google breaking with some major industrial consumer groups.

“As a company with ambitious zero-carbon energy goals, we see effective transmission planning as an opportunity to enable more zero-carbon energy by addressing the root cause of the interconnector backlog, namely a lack of transmission,” said Tyler Huebner, a former regulatory official from Wisconsin who works on Google’s energy development team.

Support for MISO’s long-term plan is not unanimous. It kept getting bigger MISO Market Monitor BacklashEconomist David Patton, who believes the grid operator is overstating the benefits of the power line portfolio.

Patton estimated the plan would cost every family in the Midwest $2,600, and he urged members of the MISO system planning committee to delay approval of the plan, scheduled in December, and reevaluate the proposed projects.

That view is shared by others, including North Dakota Public Service Commission member Julie Fedorchak, who is also the Republican candidate for North Dakota’s only seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Fedorchak joined Patton in calling on MISO to reconsider the $21.8 billion “tranche” of new power lines, saying the projects’ reliability benefits were “vastly overstated.”

North Dakota, a brown coal and petroleum producer, does not have the same need for carbon-free electricity as some other MISO states, she said.

“And we will bear exactly the same proportionate costs as everyone else, with states with very aggressive goals,” she said. “It’s not fair and we won’t agree to it.”

MISO defends its plan

MISO leaders defended their work and two years of meetings with dozens of utilities, state regulators and other parties to review the plan and underlying assumptions.

In one Memo to the MISO BoardJennifer Curran, the grid operator’s senior vice president of planning and operations, said Patton’s concerns had already been heard and addressed and that the market watcher was just one of many interested parties in the transmission planning process.

The memo went further, questioning the extent of Patton’s advocacy on the issue.

“MISO remains concerned about the effort Dr. Patton has undertaken to assess how MISO plans to transfer,” the memo said. “That’s outside his scope.”

Others also supported the memo and criticized Patton’s involvement in the process, while others defended his work. Fedorchak called the criticism of Patton “character assassination.”

The MISO long-range plan includes 4,000 miles of new transmission lines, part of a broader package of nearly 500 transmission projects expected to come before the full board for a vote in December.

The projects are expected to deliver economic value of 1.8 to 3.5 times their cost, including at least $7.2 billion in value from supporting grid decarbonization and reliability benefits amounting to at least $14 billion. MISO said the estimated benefits are conservative, in part because they only apply to the first 20 years of service of the lines and are expected to continue to benefit for decades beyond that.

Natalie McIntire of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Sustainable FERC Project agreed that the MISO numbers are conservative.

McIntire suggested that history is a guide, noting that the first long-term portfolio approved by MISO in 2011 played an invaluable role during Winter Storm Uri in February 2021, when the projects helped MISO generate power from the regional PJM connection in the east to the regional SPP grid in the west.

The estimated damage from Uri was between $80 billion and $130 billion, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

If the MISO portfolio “helps prevent future power outages and loss of life like the recent winter storms, the benefits will go far beyond what you see in the MISO analysis,” McIntire said.

Meanwhile, the SPP plan includes 89 transmission upgrades for more than 2,700 miles of power lines, designed to help meet increasing electricity demand and transition to cleaner power sources, the grid operator said in a statement.

SPP said its 14-state footprint faces a “generational challenge” as new sources of demand such as data centers, bitcoin mining and oil and gas production must be balanced with the retirement of aging fossil fuel power plants.

The network operator’s member organizations had previously approved the project portfolio with a majority of 95 percent after more than two years of review. According to SPP, the projects have a benefit-to-cost ratio of 8 to 1 – the highest of any power route collection ever proposed by SPP – while improving the network’s resilience to extreme weather events.

“The high level of consensus among our stakeholders in supporting such a significant infrastructure investment demonstrates the quality of this remarkable planning effort, which is expected to deliver significant value in the years to come,” SPP Chief Operating Officer Lanny Nickel said in the statement.