Entergy Mississippi Completes MISO Integration to lower transmission costs

Entergy Mississippi Completes MISO Integration
Customers to see meaningful benefits over next 10 years

Entergy Mississippi, Inc. completed its integration last night into the Midcontinent Independent System Operator or MISO, setting the stage for what projections show could be more than a quarter-billion dollars in customer benefits in the first decade alone, while improving reliability.

With Entergy’s “cutover,” MISO now stands as one of the nation’s largest regional transmission organizations, comprising a pool of electricity generators and users that stretches from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Entergy Mississippi can buy, sell and transmit electricity within this giant marketplace, and pass the resulting savings along to its customers.

Entergy Mississippi, along with sister utilities in Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas, worked for more than two years to reorganize teams, processes and infrastructure to integrate into MISO. Multiple economic assessments showed that the greatest customer savings would be realized when all of the Entergy companies entered MISO together.

“This is a great move for Entergy Mississippi in terms of savings and benefits for our customers,” said Haley Fisackerly, Entergy Mississippi president and CEO. “We’re grateful to the Mississippi Public Service Commission, our MISO counterparts and hundreds of Entergy teammates and vendors for their efforts toward reaching this historic milestone.”

Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant praised the move.

“This is not only good news for customers in Entergy’s service area, but good news for the rest of our state as well,” Bryant said. “Energy reliability and cost are key elements of my administration’s economic development strategy for Mississippi. Job creators are looking to site facilities in states where they can be assured that electricity will be readily available and at a reasonable cost. This move to MISO helps achieve just that.

“I applaud Entergy Mississippi and the Mississippi Public Service Commission for their work in helping to enhance Mississippi’s energy and economic development future.”

The Entergy utility operating companies’ entry into MISO represents a significant expansion for one of the largest regional transmission organizations. MISO created an entirely new region—the MISO South Region—along with new technology infrastructure and a new operations team to serve its members in the four states it added. It has also announced that it will build and staff a South Region operations center in Little Rock, Ark. next year.

Besides Entergy Mississippi, there are hundreds of other new participants in the MISO energy market. All told, the new region includes 151 transmission customers, 128 electric generating plants and 11 transmission facility owners. Independent studies have forecast that each of these sectors will realize economic value from the move to MISO.

“A regional transmission organization like MISO creates incredible economic benefits in our state and our region,” Fisackerly said. “Greater reliability, lower costs and other benefits will make Mississippi an even more attractive environment for business expansion and relocation.”

While a lot of eyes were on the cutover inside the company and at MISO, the effort went largely unnoticed by Entergy customers.

“Despite the magnitude and impact, the cutover was—and is—completely seamless from the perspective of our customers,” said Fisackerly.

The benefits projected with the move to MISO are largely attributable to its organized power markets, which allow for a more efficient commitment and dispatch of generating plants, to economies of scale offered by an RTO of MISO’s size and to MISO’s transmission cost allocation methodology that equitably allocates the costs of transmission projects to those receiving the benefits from those projects.