MRO released its 2023 Regional Summer Assessment (2023 RSA) in early June, which will be followed by a webinar on the topic on June 29, 2023. 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 summer season (June through September).
This assessment complements NERC’s Summer Reliability Assessment, which provides an evaluation of resource and transmission system adequacy necessary to meet projected summer peak demands across all of North America. MRO’s 2023 RSA takes a more granular look at reliability challenges that present a greater risk within MRO’s regional footprint and includes historical trends from previous summer seasons.
The 2023 RSA finds that although anticipated resources are sufficient to meet normal summer demand, extreme summer peak loads coupled with planned and forced generation outages could result in energy shortfalls across Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) and Southwest Power Pool (SPP). In this scenario, MISO and SPP might implement operating mitigations such as demand response, energy transfers from neighboring systems, and issuing Energy Emergency Alerts. The risk of energy shortfalls is reduced from the 2022 summer season due to additional firm import commitments, lower peak demand forecast, and higher water levels from the Missouri River and other water sources used for cooling. The report further recommends grid operators maintain situational awareness of unplanned generation and transmission outages, abnormal and extreme weather conditions, and low wind forecast periods and employ operating procedures, as needed, to ensure adequate resource availability.
State and provincial regulators should also have plans in place for managing emergency requests from grid operators.
MRO’s 2023 RSA is an independent staff assessment of the upcoming summer season to identify challenges and potential risks to the 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 summer peak demands in 2023, as well as an analysis of historical performance data to identify trends that could impact system reliability during the summer months.
Some of the topics covered in the 2023 RSA report include:
- Resource adequacy analysis and the driving force behind resource shortfalls for summer 2023.
- Bulk power system event analysis and lessons learned from last summer.
- Reliability impacts of historical MRO regional conventional generation forced outage rates.
- Performance of BES transmission lines and outages based on circuit miles.
- MRO historical misoperations of the protection system and the outage causes during summer months.
Questions on the 2023 RSA should be directed to [email protected].
– Salva Andiappan, MRO Principal Reliability Assessment Engineer