MISO Dashboard

In its 2019 SOM Report, the IMM recommended that MISO improve the testing criteria for defining market-to-market constraints.  The original intent of the M2M testing criteria was to identify constraints that will benefit from M2M coordination or for which the NMRTO’s market flows are a substantial contributor to the congestion.   Coordinating on such constraints improve price signals in the NMRTO area and lower the cost of managing congestion. However, the tests are not optimal in identifying constraints that would benefit from coordination because they do not consider the economic relief the NMRTO will likely have available.   Accordingly, we recommend that MISO work with PJM and SPP to introduce a test based on the available flow relief that can be provided by the NMRTO as a replacement for the current five percent shift factor test.

Currently, a constraint will be identified as a M2M constraint when the NMRTO has:       

• a generator with a shift factor greater than 5 percent; or    
• Market Flows over the MRTO’s constraint of greater than 25 percent of the total flows (SPP JOA) or 35 percent of the total flows (PJM JOA).                                                                                                           

As detailed in the 2019 SOM Report, our analysis shows that the 5 percent test is not very effective and that alternative tests would do a better job of identifying the most valuable constraints to define as M2M constraints. Our 2019 SOM analysis shows that a number of constraints are coordinated where the NMRTO has very little effective relief or market flow, while other constraints are not coordinated where in aggregate the NMRTO does have significant effective relief.