Forty-five million people live in the area managed by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, the organization that runs a massive portion of the North American electric grid running from Manitoba, Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico.
Inside that footprint are all or parts of 15 states, 75,000 miles of transmission lines and nearly 3,000 electric generating units: coal, nuclear, natural gas, wind, solar and hydroelectric plants.
But where the northern part of the system meets the southern end — a narrow corridor that traverses a corner of southeast Missouri and northeastern Arkansas — there’s a bottleneck that can hurt electric customers and create major inefficiencies on both sides of the divide.
“It’s definitely a problem,” said Dan Scripps, chairman of the Michigan Public Service Commission and former president of the Organization of MISO States, which represents utility regulators…
