The Midcontinent grid has opened its own express lane for power plants, and the first users have made clear what they want to build. MISO's Expedited Resource Addition Study, approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in July, drew 47 applications across 12 states with more than 26,500 MW of proposed capacity, according to the American Public Power Association. The mix is 74% natural gas, 15% battery storage, 4% wind, 4% solar and 3% nuclear. On September 26 MISO named the first 10 projects to be studied, totaling 5,300 MW with in-service dates in 2027 and 2028.
MISO delivers power across 15 U.S. states and the Canadian province of Manitoba, and says 45 million people depend on its grid. The program exists because large new loads, data centers above all, are arriving faster than MISO's regular interconnection queue can process new supply.
How ERAS works
MISO describes ERAS as a temporary, targeted solution to bring urgently needed generation online quickly amid unprecedented load growth. Its rules, as set out in MISO's July 22 release, are designed to keep the lane narrow.
The program sunsets by August 31, 2027. No more than 68 projects will be processed, with at most 10 studied each quarter. Each project must address a specific load addition or resource adequacy deficiency and be able to begin commercial operation within three to six years of submission. Interconnection service is capped at 150% of the identified need and must be in the same local resource zone. The relevant state or local retail regulator must verify the need for each project. MISO accepted applications from August 6 to 11 and studies them on a first-come, first-served basis. The first quarterly study began on September 2.
MISO chief executive John Bear said the mechanism allows the grid operator to address urgent needs while preserving state authority over resource adequacy. That reflects MISO's structure: most of its footprint is served by vertically integrated utilities whose resource plans are approved by state commissions. ERAS lets those utilities move projects tied to known load additions ahead of the general queue.
What was chosen first
The first 10 projects are five gas plants, three solar projects, one wind project and one battery, according to GO15, the association of large grid operators of which MISO is a member. They total 5,300 MW and cover MISO's full territory. They are the first of the 47 submitted, and up to 68 may be studied before the program ends.
By count, gas makes up half of the first cohort. By capacity, its share of the full application pool is far larger. The 74% gas share of the 26,500 MW pool implies roughly 19,600 MW of proposed gas capacity. The pattern mirrors PJM's Reliability Resource Initiative, which in May selected 51 projects worth 9,361 MW of unforced capacity, with combined cycle gas making up 7,756 MW of the 11,793 MW of energy capacity selected.
The demand behind it
MISO's December 2024 long-term load forecast white paper explains the urgency. It projects MISO's coincident peak load rising from 122 GW in 2024 to between 152 GW and 186 GW in 2044, a substantial increase from the 0.4% to 1.1% annual growth projected previously. Under its central scenario, which includes incentives and growth in data centers, domestic manufacturing and green hydrogen, peak load grows at 1.6% a year from 2024 to 2044. The high scenario, with faster EV adoption and more data center build-out, reaches 2.0% a year.
The white paper says data centers are expected to drive most of the load growth in the near term. It also notes a surge in Expedited Project Review requests, MISO's process for evaluating urgent transmission needs, driven by load additions.
For utilities in MISO's southern and central states, the load shows up as specific, large customer requests. A utility that has signed a contract to serve a multi-hundred-megawatt data center needs generation in a specific zone by a specific date. The regular queue, with its multi-year backlog, cannot promise that. ERAS can, within its limits.
The trade-offs
Projects that have waited years in MISO's main queue gain nothing from ERAS, while newer projects with a verified need can move ahead of them. The program's requirement that each project be tied to a verified need gives an advantage to utilities with state-approved plans and signed load, and to the technologies those utilities favor, which in much of MISO means gas.
There are also cost and emissions questions. Gas plants built in a hurry to serve data center contracts will operate for decades. If the data center load is slower to arrive or smaller than expected, the plants will still be in rate base. State regulators, who must verify need under ERAS, are the main check on that risk.
The program's design answers part of that concern: it is temporary, capped at 68 projects, and limited to needs that a regulator has verified. MISO has said it will keep strengthening the long-term interconnection process alongside ERAS.
What it means for data centers
For data center developers, ERAS is a signal that MISO's utilities can secure new generation on a timeline closer to what large customers expect. A utility that can point to an ERAS project tied to a specific campus can offer a more credible in-service date. That makes MISO states, from Louisiana to Indiana, more competitive for large campuses.
It also concentrates the gas build-out in the regions where data centers land. The 19,600 MW or so of proposed gas capacity in the ERAS pool is roughly the size of several large utility fleets. Most of it would be online before 2030, and most of it is there because of load that did not exist in MISO's planning a few years ago.
The next three quarterly cycles will show how much of the 26,500 MW clears study and how much reaches construction. The first 10 projects, with service dates in 2027 and 2028, will be the test of whether a fast lane can actually deliver faster power.