Midcontinent Independent System Operator

It's making the grid so that it can move power where it is needed quickly, affordably, and reliably across one of the most important regional seams in the country, and that comes and lands right here in Indiana.

The seam is where the Midcontinent Independent System Operator service territory meets that of the PGAM interconnection.

The border between the two regional transmission organizations runs through Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Kentucky.

Brightbill said the project will unlock two thousand to four thousand megawatts of transfer capacity for an interconnection in the Hoosier State that Governor Mike Braun dubbed a pinch point and a choke point in comments to reporters.

Uh, almost exclusively, yeah.

We, we, um, we're also participants in the, the MISO market, Midwest ISO, uh, the New York market, uh, the New England market, uh, the Ontario market on the Canadian side.

But, um, most of our participation, yeah, is in, is in PJM, and that's where most of our expertise lies.

And is, is...

Um, eventually the market does in combination with just load behavior and gen behavior and then also system operator behavior.

But, uh, before that correction happens, there's usually, uh, a bunch of, um, a bunch of volatility.

So we, we had going into this, this one summer, uh, without I guess getting into the specifics, a view on the topology change, and it, it was to do with, um, a couple of, uh, of zones actually entering in the PGM system, um, that used to be in the, in the Midwest ISO.

Um, so portions of, uh, of Ohio, um, that were kind of coming into, into PGM.

And this is part of the complex nature of that that problem.

Some RTOs, like in the Midwest, like the Mid-Continent ISO and SPP, most of their states haven't made those decisions.

On the other hand, you know, you can look at New England, right? Most of the states in New England have deregulated themselves, right? Kind of reformed their own utilities in ways that look pretty similar to Pennsylvania.

You haven't seen the level of controversy, right, with governance or outcomes in New England as you are now seeing with PJM.

Hannes has spent 35 years as a Brattle Group expert on modernization and expansion of the U.S. transmission system, and he's taught me a lot of what I know about transmission.

James joined ESIG in April 2023 after over a decade leading engineering and policy work with the Mid-Continent Independent System Operator, or MISO, one of the biggest systems in the United States.

So let's dig into this.

Hannes, the U.S. transmission system, as your paper points out, was built to be managed project by project in a completely different era.