SPP marks milestones and progress across western efforts in early November
LITTLE ROCK, ARK. — Since 2019 when Southwest Power Pool (SPP) officially became a reliability coordinator for several utilities in the Western Interconnection, the grid operator has steadily grown its western customer base and portfolio of western services. The first two weeks of November 2023 have seen SPP make significant progress in continuing to advance three of those services: its operation of the Western Resource Adequacy Program (WRAP) on behalf of Western Power Pool; Markets+, SPP’s proposed bundle of day-ahead and real-time market services; and expansion of SPP’s regional transmission organization (RTO) services into the Western Interconnection.
On November 1, an important element of the Western Power Pool’s WRAP, for which SPP is the program operator and responsible for technical implementation of the program’s design, became operational. The WRAP’s operations program produces updated forecasts each season to help determine if participants will have sufficient resources, and it enables anyone with a deficit to secure additional resources. The operations program will remain non-binding for a period, meaning that no financial charges or deficiency payments will be assessed, but it is now fully functional and available to enhance system reliability.
“SPP is grateful for our partnership with Western Power Pool and the opportunity to help assure resource adequacy for their member utilities,” said Casey Cathey, SPP’s Senior Director of Grid Asset Utilization who has led SPP’s efforts as WRAP program operator. “We understand the importance of both resource adequacy and regionalization, and are proud of the work we’ve done to advance both causes for WRAP participants.”
