The ITC merger and link-up with MISO.
Bruce W. Radford is publisher of Public Utilities Fortnightly. Contact him at radford@pur.com.
The thing to know about Entergy’s bid to join the Midwest ISO—and its plan to first sell its transmission lines to burgeoning grid giant ITC—is just how many moving parts are involved.
Instead of consolidating the transaction within a single application filed at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, where regulators and industry stakeholders might debate the full range of issues, the three principals have sliced and diced their deal into many separate smaller pieces, each with its own docketed proceeding at FERC. This makes it difficult for would-be opponents to get a handle.
Much will depend on whether Entergy’s planned sale of its grid assets to ITC will clear FERC approval by June as planned, six months ahead of Entergy’s anticipated integration into MISO in mid-December, which is timed to coincide with the date that Entergy’s Arkansas distribution utility will quit Entergy’s long-running multi-state system agreement. So it won’t be until the last weeks of 2013 when the Entergy retail arm will bring in its generation and load to join MISO as a transmission-dependent market participant.