Seattle City Light presented its proposal for the Bonneville Power Administration’s overhaul of the agency’s transmission planning process, saying BPA should offer interim conditional firm service (CFS) to most developers in the 61-GW transmission service queue.
During a Jan. 15 customer-led meeting, SCL’s Michael Watkins said the municipal utility supports many of the proposed alternatives under BPA’s Grid Access Transformation (GAT) project, including moving toward proactive transmission planning, “so that you’re planning ahead of customer needs, not responding to customer requests.”
BPA has a goal of reducing the time from transmission request to service to five to six years.
Watkins said SCL supports that goal and “Bonneville acquiring the resources to be able to do that.”
“We believe that future makes sense if customers can access conditional firm service/non-firm service, in the very near to short time, so that customers can react nimbly to a very changing landscape with some conditional firm service to get transmission service to meet those needs,” Watkins said.
BPA launched the GAT initiative to consider changes to its planning processes following a surge of transmission service requests (TSRs). The most recent transmission study includes 61 GW of new generation, compared with 5.9 GW in 2021, according to the agency. (See BPA Tx Planning Overhaul Prompts Concern for Northwest Clean Energy Compliance.)
BPA’s proposal to tackle the queue involves a two-part approach: a transitional phase to get off the pause and a longer-term “future state” that will include more substantial reforms to BPA’s existing transmission processes, such as shifting toward proactive transmission planning or stricter evaluation criteria of TSRs to reduce the queue.
But even with the “myriad” of options BPA has presented, the queue will remain around 31 GW, which will take about five to seven years to study, according to SCL’s presentation slides.
“We just don’t see that as a real solution for the region,” Watkins said.
BPA staff noted during the meeting that the agency does not have a proposal, only alternatives for stakeholders to consider, saying “it’s entirely possible … under the strictest application of new evaluation criteria, that the queue would be significantly smaller than the 31 GW that’s on the slide.”
“So, again, not a proposal, but just there are some options that would get us to a significantly smaller queue,” BPA staff said.
‘Daring and Bold’
Still, BPA should offer interim CFS with few exceptions to address the queue, Watkins argued. CFS is a form of long-term firm transmission service that allows BPA to curtail the reservation under certain circumstances, according to BPA documents.
“I believe where we’re at as a region has led us to a place where our best option is to now operate by curtailment,” Watkins said. “And in 99.9% of the time of the hours of the Northwest, there is never curtailment, even though there’s almost unlimited non-firm every one of those hours. I believe in the short term … we could live with … curtailment, with almost unlimited conditional firm service on our system, with the caveat that when we’re in extreme weather events it’s not going to work.”
To secure CFS, customers would, for example, sign contracts with additional requirements, such as length of contract, securitizing future and unknown projects, and securitizing five years of service rates.
“We think if we go down that route, that most of the queue will self-select to get out of the queue,” Watkins said. “Therefore, you don’t need a lot of large policy levers pulled to filter out the queue with. And that lends itself to queue management.”
BPA staff called the idea “daring and bold,” noting that the proposal has been up for discussion in the past.
Staff appeared to acknowledge the potential of offering CFS as a way to clear the queue by requiring financial commitments. Still, they warned that if more customers than expected accept the offer, it could put the agency and the region in a tricky spot.
“If we are surprised by the number that accept the offers, the amount of work in front of us to catch up on the sub grid might be more than we could handle, and so we may have gotten ourselves then into a reliability issue that we can’t build our way fast enough out of,” staff said. “And so it’s just hard to say exactly how much risk we would be exposed to collectively. That’s not Bonneville’s risk. That would be all of our risk.”
