MISO undergoes a digital transformation with Microsoft Industry Solutions Delivery

Providing electricity for millions

The Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) is an electric grid operator that ensures power flows reliably across 15 states in the Midcontinent USA and the Canadian province of Manitoba. Its three main responsibilities are planning the future grid, maintaining reliability of the Bulk Electric System (BES) 24/7 for approximately 50 million users, and operating the wholesale electricity market by sustaining the balance between supply and demand. The Digital Solution Delivery team at MISO supports this mission by helping transform the technology ecosystem and ensuring the security and reliability of critical applications.

Since 1998, the nonprofit has operated under the jurisdiction of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). FERC orders indicate how MISO can maintain its reliability and how it will operate in the future. Sometimes policymakers turn to FERC to start preparing the energy industry for a new reality, as the energy industry has changed dramatically in the last two decades and will continue to change. For MISO specifically, there are three main components causing significant change in its generation fleet, the group of power plants that generate electricity. For one, the types of generation resources are changing from predictable types to unpredictable—with a 20% reduction in coal energy and a tenfold increase in wind energy. And MISO is still figuring out how to accurately predict solar and wind. Another complexity is where the energy demands are coming from, as datacenters and electric vehicles are influencing the grid population. Finally, the workforce is changing, as 40-50% of employees are retiring, and the industry is losing people with decades of experience who understand the system.

FERC orders like FERC 2222 and FERC 1920 are pushing MISO towards planning for these shifts in the industry. FERC 2222 will better enable distributed energy resources (DERs) to participate in the electricity markets run by regional grid operators. FERC 1920 will require transmission providers to conduct long-term grid planning.

Building a more deliberate data strategy

To better adapt to both internal and external changes, MISO aimed to modernize its data operations by eliminating manual processes and automating workflows, with a particular focus on enhancing its data analytics and modeling capabilities. The company’s existing workflows depended on manual information hand-offs, leading to confusion among teams about what changes were made, by whom, where, and when. As a result, the team spent significant time debugging data quality issues instead of uncovering valuable insights. MISO, as well as the industry at large, doesn’t currently have a common information model, which has often led to inconsistencies and created knowledge siloes. “Our niche is how to plan the grid, operate the markets, and maintain reliability. We’re not experienced in digital transformation efforts,” says Abdul-Rahman Mohammed, Director of Data Analytics and Decision Services at MISO.

With the growth of renewable energy, datacenters, and EV adoption, MISO needed to analyze and incorporate new types of data, such as wind and solar energy, generator availability, fuel, transmission congestion, and net scheduled interchange (the sum of energy imports and exports), into its uncertainty management plans. MISO required a modern data strategy that could provide advanced analytics and a robust data platform. This strategy aimed to create better workflows and standardization, ensuring that the exact amount of clean energy is generated when and where it is needed.

Providing the right data estate to help MISO become data driven

After going through an RFP process, MISO chose Microsoft to help modernize its data strategy and be more adaptable for the future. “Microsoft said they’d not only provide a strategy, but they’d implement it as well. They became a strategic partner,” says Mohammed. Microsoft and MISO began with envisioning sessions that led to the creation of the appropriate data estate based on Azure that helps with data preparation, agility, and resilience—truly treating data as a company asset.

The data platform provides MISO with a centralized location for consuming and visualizing multiple data sources, which results in a reduction of manual handoffs, increased self-service capabilities, and accelerated secure onboarding of new datasets. “With the platform, we now have a solution that is modern and can stay the course of time. It will allow us to create a common curated space and do amazing things with data,” says Mohammed. The Microsoft data strategy and IP accelerators provided data-driven change management strategies for people, processes, and organizational readiness. These strategies are based on the internal data estate journey from Microsoft and include essential building blocks such as data lake provisioning, ingestion, handshakes, data contracts, and discoverability. All of these elements are designed to focus on achieving business outcomes.

For the uncertainty management use case, the MISO team and Microsoft built a machine learning model to figure out net uncertainty across all legacy systems, which had been in place for decades. For its more recent data use case concerning economic planning and technology modernization, the team is improving its process on how to access, audit, and clean data before it enters the power flow model (the mathematical modeling of the electrical grid). This effort helped make this process efficient and allows MISO staff to focus more on analytics.

With Microsoft Purview acting as a data dictionary showing where data is stored, MISO hopes to make it an enterprise tool by leveraging security and other data quality features in the future. Power BI is being rolled out across the company as an additional visualization tool so that employees can recognize data patterns and anomalies. “We have a decentralized model that we call a ‘hub and spoke’ operating model that our Digital Solutions Delivery team uses to build products and capabilities and bring them into the organization,” says Mohammed. “But anybody in the organization can eventually start doing this. The goal is for anyone to be able to use the data products in the Azure environment.”

Targeting a broader culture change

The platform and data strategy are part of a larger plan to upskill MISO employees, which has changed the company’s approach to creating solutions and created a data-driven culture. “Our experience with Microsoft in-house was very powerful in helping us change the pillars of our organization,” says Mohammed. MISO now has a weekly working group that brings together experts for all digital services, from architecture to security to data governance to solve technical challenges. In the past, teams and groups were working on problems independently without much automated sharing.

The Data Strategy Framework and the collaboration with Microsoft has helped MISO accelerate delivery of technology solutions and enabled business areas quicker. The collaboration and experience with Microsoft ISD has demonstrated a modern and agile way of delivering on MISO’s strategic outcomes. “The quality of delivery and the way Microsoft teams collaborated with our teams was phenomenal,” says Mohammed. MISO is inspired by the level of progress it has been able to accomplish in the last two years and is looking to use its strategies, plans, resources, and skills to implement emerging technologies that will transform the energy industry.

Discover more about MISO on X and LinkedIn.