SPP’s Strategic Planning Committee on Monday unanimously endorsed its Strategic Market Roadmap for 2020 that is designed to improve market efficiency, reliability and price formation.
Staff told committee members a “calculated, holistic approach” to implementing the roadmap process will increase its value and affordability. As proposed, staff and stakeholders will annually identify, educate, rank and approve new and existing Integrated Marketplace initiatives for development over the next two to five years.
SPP says the roadmap ensures its strategic plan’s foundational strategies are driving the initiatives, increasing transparency and collaboration. SPP and stakeholders will gain efficiencies in budgeting, project management, cross-departmental resource planning and teamwork because of proactive planning and alignment of work, according to the RTO.
“This is a remarkable step forward,” said Larry Altenbaumer, chair of both the SPC and SPP Board of Directors.
The 2020 roadmap resulted in 44 initiatives, ranging from offering an uncertainty market product to developing a real-time hedging product, dispersed into three buckets through 2025: high priority, medium priority and parking lot. Most of the initiatives (38 of 44) seek to improve market efficiency.
The Markets and Operations Policy Committee will consider the roadmap Wednesday during its quarterly meeting.
Erin Cathey, SPP senior market design analyst, piloted the process with the Market Working Group in 2017-18. Additional structure was added to the process before work on the 2020 development cycle last October.
She said managing the roadmap will be an ongoing effort, calling it a “living work plan” necessitated by a “dynamic environment with diverse and changing needs.”
Subsequent development cycles will be condensed, beginning in October and finishing in time for approval during the regular April governance meetings.
Over the next few years, the roadmap will be added to SPP’s transmission planning, operations and supply adequacy functional areas.
3 HITT Recommendations Approved
The SPC also approved three recommendations that came out of last year’s Holistic Integrated Tariff Team report. (See SPP Board Approves HITT’s Recommendations.)
Members narrowly approved a recommendation, by an 8-5 vote, to maintain a 1.0 benefit-to-cost threshold for economic projects, which brought out the usual divisions between transmission owners and transmission customers. The Economic Studies Working Group analyzed whether SPP should increase the B/C ratio to between 1.05 and 1.25 before deciding to stick with the status quo.
“There’s almost a [transmission] consumer-IOU [investor-owned utility] dichotomy,” said Golden Spread Electric Cooperative’s Mike Wise, who voted against the measure. “We’ve got to do better than this. This was an effort by consumers to ensure we’re not inappropriately building transmission that doesn’t have a cost benefit.”
Oklahoma Gas & Electric’s Greg McAuley asked to correct the record and said, “We’re one IOU in favor of raising the benefit-cost ratio.
“We’re talking about 40-year assets,” he said. “We’re looking for a little bit more security in the decision to ensure what is being constructed will deliver those benefits.”
A 1.25 threshold would have required a Tariff change and revisions to the transmission planning process, SPP General Counsel Paul Suskie said.
The SPC unanimously approved the addition of ramping capability to the Integrated Marketplace and a study of essential reliability service and other reliability service. Wise abstained from the latter vote, noting the three stakeholder groups that had already approved the study voted on whether SPP had finished its work.
The MOPC will vote on ramping capability as a revision request (MWG RR402) on its consent agenda. The measure introduces a design change that uses near-real-time economic dispatch to evaluate intraday reliability unit commitments for fast-start resources.
