ACORE and Grid Strategies release analysis, best practices for large-scale transmission

The American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) and Grid Strategies issued a report that identifies best practices for quantifying the benefits of large-scale transmission, following the Midcontinent Independent System Operator’s (MISO) recent approval of 18 new transmission lines.

The MISO approvals represent the largest transmission expansion in U.S. history to enable low-cost clean energy. The ACORE/Grid Strategies report – entitled Enabling Low-Cost Clean Energy and Reliable Service Through Better Transmission Benefits Analysis — explores MISO’s long-range transmission planning process and the methodologies used to evaluate transmission benefits, offering recommendations on areas that can be improved and replicated by other planning entities and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

“When the benefits of proposed transmission lines are fully calculated, the advantages of new lines are made clear to regional planners,” ACORE’s President and CEO Gregory Wetstone said. “Building off MISO’s forward-leaning process, our analysis offers a roadmap for FERC and other planning entities that, if adopted, will result in a cleaner, lower-cost electric grid. FERC does not yet have standards in place on what transmission benefits to measure and how, resulting in widely varied and imprecise practices nationwide.”

MISO’s plan identified approximately $37.3 billion worth of benefits from the 18 new transmission lines. However, the ACORE/Grid Strategies analysis found that to be a conservative estimate that potentially undercounts billions of dollars in value. Further, the new report benchmarks the benefits MISO assessed with the 12 categories suggested in FERC’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on transmission planning.

“MISO pioneered multi-benefit planning and has done it again with this latest portfolio,” Rob Gramlich, founder and president of Grid Strategies, said. “While it is both common-sense and standard economic policy to consider all of the benefits and all of the costs when doing benefit-cost analysis or evaluating public utility investments, it is unfortunately not at all standard at this time in the U.S. transmission sector. With this report we hope to highlight MISO’s good methods, suggest some modest improvements, and encourage similar practices in other planning regions.”

The report was prepared by Grid Strategies for ACORE on behalf of the Macro Grid Initiative.