MRO is releasing its 2022 Regional Winter Assessment (2022 RWA) in early December, which will be followed by a webinar on the topic on December 15, 2022. The assessment provides information and awareness to industry leaders and registered entities, regulatory agencies, and other key stakeholders on the expected health of the bulk power system within MRO’s regional footprint for the upcoming winter season. This assessment complements NERC’s Winter Reliability Assessment, which provides an evaluation of resource and transmission system adequacy necessary to meet projected winter peak demands across all of North America, by taking a more granular look at reliability challenges that present a greater risk within MRO’s regional footprint. MRO also includes historical trends as part of its seasonal assessments.

NERC’s 2022 Winter Reliability Assessment (WRA) highlights the risks of potential energy shortfalls this winter for Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO). MISO is projecting insufficient capacity available to meet forecasted seasonal peak load with typical maintenance and forced outages this winter and could require implementation of operating mitigations such as load modifying resources (LMRs) or non-firm imports to meet reserve requirements. Extreme winter conditions may result in insufficient capacity to cover anticipated extreme winter peak demands, placing MISO at high risk of implementing Energy Emergency Alerts (EEAs). Since the last (2021/2022) winter season, MISO’s reserve margins have fallen by over 5 percent—totaling over 4.2 GW—because of nuclear and coal-fired generation retirements. The report further recommends state and provincial regulators to consider energy risks for the upcoming winter season and take steps to delay imminent generation retirements if essential to reliability.

MRO’s 2022 RWA is an independent assessment of the upcoming winter season to identify challenges and potential risks to reliable operation of the bulk power system within MRO’s regional footprint. This assessment provides an in-depth evaluation of resource adequacy necessary to meet projected winter peak demands in 2022, as well as an analysis of historical performance data to identify trends that could impact system reliability during the winter months.

Some of the topics covered during the 2022 RWA webinar will be:

• Resource adequacy analysis and the driving force behind resource shortfalls for winter 2022
• MRO 2021-2022 Generation Winterization Program and findings
• Reliability impacts of historical MRO regional conventional generation forced outage rates
• Performance of BES transmission lines and outages based on circuit miles
• MRO historical operations and misoperations of the protection system and the outage causes during winter months.

The 2022 RWA webinar registration information can be found here.

– Salva Andiappan, Principal Reliability Assessment Engineer, MRO