POWER GRIDIn the Central U.S., an Electric Grid Bottleneck Persists
Forty-five million people live in the area managed by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, the organization that runs a massive portion of the North American electric grid running from Manitoba, Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico. Where the northern part of the system meets the southern end — a narrow corridor that traverses a corner of southeast Missouri and northeastern Arkansas — there’s a bottleneck that can hurt electric customers and create major inefficiencies on both sides of the divide.
Forty-five million people live in the area managed by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, the organization that runs a massive portion of the North American electric grid running from Manitoba, Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico.
Inside that footprint are all or parts of 15 states, 75,000 miles of transmission lines and nearly 3,000 electric generating units: coal, nuclear, natural gas, wind, solar and hydroelectric plants.
But where the northern part of the system meets the southern end — a narrow corridor that traverses a corner of southeast Missouri and northeastern Arkansas — there’s a bottleneck that can hurt electric customers and create major inefficiencies on both sides of the divide.
“It’s definitely a problem,” said Dan Scripps, chairman of the Michigan Public Service Commission and former president of the Organization of MISO States, which represents utility regulators in MISO territory. “The price separation you see between the regions is concerning.”
The limited ability to shift power between the regions has been a long-standing concern. But a paper published earlier this year by an energy economist says a major utility company in MISO’s southern region, Entergy, has big financial incentives to resist better transmission connections which the company has been repeatedly accused of doing.
The analysis by Catherine Hausman, an associate professor at the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, says two Entergy subsidiaries, Entergy Louisiana and Entergy Arkansas, would have “seen profits lowered by $930 million in 2022 under market integration.” The report was published in January by the National Bureau of Economic Research as a working paper, which is circulated prior to peer review. Though complaints about the north-south constraint have been long-standing, Hausman’s paper for the first time quantifies potential losses to power plant revenue if it gets fixed.
In a statement to States Newsroom, Entergy said Hausman’s paper presents “a false and misleading narrative about Entergy and its approach to new transmission investment.” The company added that, per the regulatory models it operates under, “profits do not depend on how often its generators run.”
A MISO spokesman said the organization had no comment on Hausman’s paper. However, MISO does plan to upgrade the connection in the years to come as part of its long-range transmission planning process.
