Almost $40 billion worth of new high-voltage power lines in the central U.S. took a step forward this week as regional grid operators that cover more than two dozen states advanced plans to meet rising electricity demand and enable a transition to cleaner energy.
The board of directors of the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) overwhelmingly approved a $7.68 billion transmission plan Tuesday — the largest collection of projects approved by the regional grid operator in its 20 years as the transmission planning coordinator for the Great Plains region.
To the east, a board committee for the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) heard strong support — and some pushback — on a proposal for an historic $30 billion transmission portfolio, most of which is aimed at developing a high-voltage backbone for the region’s power grid.
The $21.8 billion portfolio of long-range transmission projects in MISO’s plan, in particular, is responsive to a massive overhaul of the region’s generating fleet. It’s partially driven by recent climate laws passed in Illinois, Michigan and Minnesota aimed at transitioning away from fossil fuels.
But the plan is also geared at bolstering reliability in the region by enabling transfers of electricity between states that will help guard against extreme weather — the very type of forward-looking planning that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission envisioned when it adopted its landmark Order 1920 earlier this year.
“This is exactly the type of long-range planning that FERC wants,” said Bob McKee, director of strategic projects and execution at American Transmission, a Wisconsin-based transmission utility.
Other transmission-owning utilities stated support for MISO’s long-range plan, including Xcel Energy, Great River Energy, Ameren and ITC. They were joined by representatives of state utility commissions in Minnesota, Iowa and Michigan; environmental groups; and technology giant Google, which breaks with some large industrial consumer groups.
“As a company with ambitious carbon-free energy goals, we see effective transmission planning as enabling more carbon-free energy by fixing the root cause of the interconnection backlog, which is a lack of transmission,” said Tyler Huebner, a former Wisconsin regulator who works on Google’s energy development team.
Support for MISO’s long-range plan isn’t unanimous. It continued to get pushback from MISO’s market monitor, economist David Patton, who believes the grid operator is overstating the benefits of the portfolio of power lines.
Patton estimated the plan would cost each family in the Midwest $2,600, and he asked members of MISO’s system planning committee to hold off on approving the plan as scheduled in December and reevaluate the proposed projects.
That view is shared by others, including Julie Fedorchak, a member of the North Dakota Public Service Commission, who is also the GOP candidate for North Dakota’s lone seat in the U.S. House.
Fedorchak joined Patton in asking MISO to rethink the $21.8 billion “tranche” of new power lines, saying the reliability benefits of the projects are “grossly overstated.”
North Dakota, a producer of lignite and petroleum, doesn’t have the same carbon-free power requirement as some other states in MISO, she said.
“And we’re going to bear the same exact proportionate cost as anybody else, with states with very aggressive goals,” she said. “That’s not fair, and we are not going to be going along with that.”
MISO defends its plan
MISO executives defended their work and two years of meeting with dozens of utilities, state regulators and other parties to vet the plan and its underlying assumptions.
In a memo to MISO’s board, Jennifer Curran, the grid operator’s senior vice president of planning and operations, said Patton’s concerns have already been heard and addressed and that the market monitor is but one of many interested parties in the transmission planning process.
The memo went further, questioning the scope of Patton’s advocacy on the issue.
“MISO remains concerned about the amount of effort Dr. Patton has put into assessing how MISO plans transmission,” the memo said. “This is outside of his scope of work.”
Others also supported the memo and criticized Patton’s involvement in the process while some others defended his work. Fedorchak called the criticism of Patton “character assassination.”
The MISO long-range plan includes 4,000 miles of new high-voltage power lines that are part of a broader package of nearly 500 transmission projects expected to go before the full board for a vote in December.
The projects are projected to deliver economic value equal 1.8 to 3.5 times their cost, including at least $7.2 billion of value from helping decarbonize the grid and at least $14 billion in reliability benefits. MISO has said the estimated benefits are conservative, in part because they look only at the first 20 years the lines are in service, and they’re expected to be useful for decades beyond that.
Natalie McIntire, of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Sustainable FERC Project, agreed that MISO’s numbers are conservative.
McIntire suggested history is a guide, noting that the initial long-range portfolio approved by MISO in 2011 played an invaluable role during Winter Storm Uri in February 2021 when the projects helped MISO move power from the regional PJM Interconnection in the east to the SPP regional grid to its west.
Estimated damages from Uri ranged from $80 billion to $130 billion, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
If the MISO portfolio “helps avoid future blackouts and loss of lives like those seen during the recent winter storms, the benefits will well exceed what you see in MISO’s analysis,” McIntire said.
Meanwhile, the SPP plan includes 89 transmission upgrades representing more than 2,700 miles of power lines aimed at helping meet rising power demand growth and a shift to cleaner sources of electricity, the grid operator said in a statement.
SPP said its 14-state footprint faces a “generational challenge” from the need to balance new sources of demand, like data centers, bitcoin mining, and oil and gas production, with the retirement of aging fossil fuel plants.
The grid operator’s member organizations previously approved the portfolio of projects with a 95 percent majority after more than two years of study. The projects have a benefit-to-cost ratio of 8-to-1 — the highest of any collection of power lines ever proposed by SPP — while improving grid resilience in the face of extreme weather events, according to SPP.
“The high degree of consensus among our stakeholders in support of such a significant infrastructure investment demonstrates the quality of this remarkable planning effort which is expected to provide significant value for years to come,” Lanny Nickel, SPP’s chief operating officer, said in the statement.