By Jonathan Fortner, LEC Director of Government Relations

LEC to join the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) Advisory Committee

Last week, MISO’s Advisory Committee voted in favor of a proposal to create a new “Affiliate” sector, which would provide the Lignite Energy Council and other related organizations with unique participation and market perspectives regarding reliability, cost allocation, resource availability and long term planning. The LEC has a long history of supporting a level playing field for all electricity resources and we will be working to ensure that fuel secure and resilient resource attributes are properly compensated in the same way the market values other attributes.

The LEC has been leading on this initiative for the past 18 months in order to provide a voice for coal in the marketplace. We faced many hurdles in our pursuit along the way, but we used those opportunities to build key relationships within MISO that helped pioneer an organizational change to give us a seat at the MISO Advisory Committee table. Through this experience we built a coalition of organizations with similar interests that will also join MISO and work with us in the new stakeholder sector, which includes chambers of commerce, mining companies and trade associations in Minnesota and North Dakota. Each of those entities have a strong interest in our region’s energy future to make sure that affordable and resilient electricity remains economically competitive. Further details surrounding the creation and function of the new sector will decided by the Board of Directors at their meeting in late March 2020.

Two-thirds of the nation’s coal fleet resides in ISO/RTO markets, and MISO holds the largest coal fleet with nearly 57,000 MW of fuel-secure generation which is important given the coal fleet’s unique role in helping to maintain an affordable, reliable and resilient electric grid.