The Bonneville Power Administration is starting a new pilot program to decrease the balancing reserve capacity it must hold to account for variable resources by connecting new types of generation facilities to its grid.

As part of the New Generation Technology Pilot, BPA will work with generators to “encourage development of technologies and operations” that reduce balancing reserve capacity requirements in the agency’s balancing authority area, BPA staff said at a Jan. 13 workshop to explain the program.

A presentation from the workshop outlined three objectives for the pilot:

• • incentivizing “accurate scheduling and performance”;
  • establishing a “technology inclusive policy” for participation; and
  • fostering collaboration between BPA and generators “to enable novel approaches to lower the amount of capacity needed” to integrate variable generation.

Participating resources could include nuclear power plants or wave energy structures, BPA electric engineer Ross Ponder said during the workshop.

A proposed project will need to meet performance metrics, which will be established based on historical balancing reserve capacity usage and projections, Ponder said. Participation in the pilot will rely on a reduction in station control error (SCE), and BPA will revise a project’s performance expectations if the project increases its SCE, Ponder said.

The pilot program “essentially can be … used to provide a method to reduce generators’ balancing reserves capacity,” Ponder said.

Battery energy storage systems (BESS) and nuclear facilities are two possible resource types eligible for the pilot, Bart McManus, a BPA engineer, said at the workshop.

However, “we are not saying [a project] has to be BESS or nuke,” McManus added. “We are looking for innovative strategies. We don’t run solar plants. We don’t run nuke plants. So if you have something that could work, absolutely bring it to the table and we will talk through it.”

One meeting participant asked about the current performance and buildout of co-located generation and battery storage in BPA’s region.

“We don’t really have a lot of examples of co-located generation,” BPA engineer Nancy Morales said. “So the status quo is there is minimal impact of co-located resources.”

A meeting participant also said that the pilot has “technically been around for a while, but the last I heard about it … is that nobody had taken Bonneville up on the offer to participate in it.”

“When did this pilot begin and has anyone taken you up on it yet?” the participant added. “Is there anything that is different about it now?”

“We have a few requests to join the [pilot],” Ponder said. “We are currently in the design phase … but we don’t have anyone active yet.”

Ponder added that he expected to hold a few more meetings later in 2026 to discuss the pilot and respond to future questions.

When a generator or load connects to BPA’s grid, BPA must provide balancing reserves at a rate and amount determined by the agency for reliability purposes. BPA can provide balancing reserve capacity to cover a 99.7% planning standard for balancing error events without unreasonably impairing reliability, the agency said in a September 2025 document.