The Bonneville Power Administration has unveiled its proposals for overhauling its transmission planning, with help from the industry. 

BPA in February paused certain transmission planning processes to consider new reforms in light of significant growth in transmission service requests. The agency’s 2025 transmission cluster study includes more than 65 GW of requests, compared with 5.9 GW in 2021. The requests exceed the total regional load predicted for the Pacific Northwest in 2034, according to the agency. (See BPA Halts Some Tx Planning Processes Amid Service Requests.) 

During a July 9 workshop, BPA outlined its plan for tackling the queue and ultimately reforming its processes to reach the agency’s vision of reducing the time from transmission request to service to five to six years. (See Industry Sees Challenges as BPA Considers ‘Radical’ Updates to Tx Planning.) 

For example, the agency is considering implementing readiness criteria and a new Network Integration Transmission Service initiative where any new forecast increase of 13 MW or more during any year would require participation in commercial planning. 

“If you can’t meet the readiness requirements, you leave the queue, and we keep funneling it down until we get to a place where in our long-term firm queue management, we’ve either offered you transmission service on a firm basis, we’ve offered it on a conditional firm basis or some other less than firm,” said Abbey Nulph, manager of transmission commercial planning at BPA. 

“Our goal is to make as many offers to those that remain as we can so that folks are getting service, potentially not the long-term firm that everybody wants, but the best that we can without degrading the quality of service for existing rights holders,” Nulph added. 

The agency also is contemplating offering interim service and moving toward proactive planning, meaning building ahead of transmission service requests, according to the workshop presentation. 

BPA told RTO Insider in a statement that proactive planning “is a 20-year scenario-based power flow, capacity expansion and production cost modeling study, performed with robust stakeholder engagement, that will give BPA the vision to identify the evolving transmission needs within our area.” 

“This study will operate on a two- [to] three-year cycle and will feed an evolving transmission expansion and reinforcement project portfolio for which BPA will establish a transparent project selection process,” according to the statement. “The planning scenario will be based on a set of models ranging from capacity expansion to NERC planning standard-based power flow studies.” 

The agency received support for its framework from stakeholders participating in the meeting. One representative from the Columbia River PUD said the “proactive planning makes a lot of sense because it gives us the ability to take a holistic view of a community and for you to do the same thing when you make your decisions. It’s not just about a company but really looking at the opportunities and what’s going on in the community.” 

However, some also raised concerns about recent staffing cuts at the agency and how the costs associated with the reforms will affect ratepayers.  

Fred Heutte, senior policy associate at the Northwest Energy Coalition, said in an interview he supports BPA’s initiative. 

“We have a lot more extreme weather. We have a big heat wave coming here next week during a low hydro period,” Heutte said. “We do need more transmission to bring on the … more diverse set of resources so we can keep the grid going. And so I really feel like BPA has put good principles on the table.” 

Still, Heutte said BPA must ensure customers have fair access to new transmission rights and that the new readiness criteria are flexible. 

“There needs to be a real focus on transparency of how they’re handling transmission requests and sorting them out through this new process that they’re developing,” Heutte said. He added that BPA needs to be “very clear about what their intended outcomes are and work closely with the customers and … with the state commissions.” 

During the July 9 workshop, Nulph pointed to these principles, saying the agency will focus on transparency and collaboration and provide insights into how it will “solicit information, which data inputs we use, which scenarios we run, how we select the projects that come out the other end of those studies.” 

“We don’t want this to be a BPA plan,” Nulph said. “We want it to be BPA’s plan to satisfy the regional needs.”