Southwest Power Pool expanding westward

With commitments from Rocky Mountain states, the Southwest Power Pool announced it will be expanding its coordinating services westward in 2019, a continuation of managing the region’s electric power grid.

Several western states have committed to receive the power pool’s Reliability Coordinator services.  The services have been offered for more than two decades in the Eastern Interconnection which includes Oklahoma.

The new additions in 2019 will include:

  • Arizona Electric Power Cooperative, Inc.
  • Black Hills Energy’s three electric utilities:  Black Hills Power, Inc., Cheyenne Light, Fuel and Power Company, and Black Hills Colorado Electric, Inc.
  • City of Farmington, NM
  • Colorado Springs Utilities
  • El Paso Electric Company
  • Intermountain Rural Electric Association
  • Platte River Power Authority
  • Public Service Company of Colorado (Xcel Energy)
  • Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association
  • Tucson Electric Power
  • Western Area Power Administration (WAPA) Desert Southwest Region, WAPA Rocky Mountain Region, and WAPA Upper Great Plains – West

“We’ve worked hard over the last several months to demonstrate the quality and breadth of our service in terms of technical expertise, a customer-centric approach to doing business and the integrity of our people and processes,” said Carl Monroe, SPP’s executive vice president and chief operating officer based in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Consistent with a strategic focus on reliability assurance, member value and affordability, SPP has provided contract RC services across a multistate region in the past and expanded its services and territory several times in the last decade. Through this expansion of its RC service, SPP aims to leverage its expertise and systems to provide reliability and cost savings to western utilities while lowering costs for its existing members.

With input from customers, future neighboring Reliability Coordinators and regulatory stakeholders, SPP soon will finalize plans for the governance and operation of its western reliability coordination services. This will include filling a number of positions related to system operations and engineering. Following a year-long build-out of the necessary systems, processes and staff to support effective reliability coordination, SPP will seek to be certified as an RC in the second half of 2019.

SPP is working with Peak Reliability and California ISO to coordinate operations with other RCs in the Western Interconnection and will ensure there are no gaps in situational awareness throughout customers’ transitions from one RC to another. SPP-provided RC services will be ready to go live in December 2019.