The Southwest Power Pool, of which Oklahoma is a member, issued an energy emergency alert Friday morning, one that did not require consumers to conserve energy.
But it put member states on notice that all available resources were being committed to meet power obligations.
Here is the notice issued for what is called an Energy Emergency Alert Level 1.
SPP declared an Energy Emergency Alert (EEA) Level 1 for its entire SPP Balancing Authority (BA) footprint in the Eastern Interconnection effective at 8:27 a.m. CT Friday, Dec. 23, 2022, until further notice. An EEA Level 1 is declared when all available resources have been committed to meet obligations, and SPP is at risk of not meeting required operating reserves. The SPP BA is experiencing extreme cold weather, higher than normal outages, high loads, and wind icing uncertainty. At this time, the SPP BA is still able to maintain its minimum contingency reserve requirements.
An EEA Level 1 does not require the public to conserve energy. Individuals should contact their local utility for details specific to their area. The SPP BA is notifying Market Participants that emergency ranges of any resources may be required, resources with a commit status of reliability will be committed as available, and some fixed export interchange transactions will be curtailed during the EEA.
An EEA1 is the first of three levels of energy emergency alert. An EEA2 would be triggered if SPP could no longer meet expected energy requirements and was considered energy deficient, or if SPP foresaw or had taken actions up to but excluding the interruption of firm load obligations. At this point, SPP would have utilized available energy reserves and would have requested assistance from other neighboring utility operators.
Generation and transmission operators have been provided instructions on applicable procedures, including cancelling or postponing maintenance/testing of critical transmission/generator facilities, reporting any limitations, fuel shortages or concerns, and operating with timely coordination calls, as needed, to share reliability information with impacted entities.