By Tom Kleckner
SPP’s Board of Directors and Members Committee on Tuesday approved a set of conditions that will guide Mountain West Transmission Group’s pending membership into the RTO.
SPP said the board’s endorsement during a special meeting in Dallas represents “a vote of confidence in the value of Mountain West’s membership and the benefits it will bring to SPP’s existing members, the Mountain West entities” and their customers.
COO Carl Monroe, who has been leading the RTO’s team during the negotiations, told RTO Insider he has been pleased with the work so far.
“We have been able to alleviate some of [Mountain West’s] concerns with joining SPP,” Monroe said Wednesday. “We’ve been able to work together and move forward. We’re pleased to come to this point, where we have general agreement of the things that are required to have Mountain West join SPP.”
The board approved 18 policy statements and directed staff and stakeholders to begin revising SPP’s Tariff, bylaws, membership agreement and other governing documents. The RTO’s Corporate Governance Committee and working groups will coordinate the work through the normal stakeholder process.
Changes to SPP’s Governing Documents Tariff will be presented for approval by stakeholder groups prior to going to the Members Committee and board.
The policies govern the terms of SPP membership, governance, the cost to operate the four DC ties in the SPP footprint, transmission planning and resource adequacy, and rates and revenue. SPP’s Regional State Committee would be expanded to include state commissioners from the Mountain West region.
SPP has scheduled a webinar on March 22 to provide further detail on the policies.
SPP and Mountain West members have been meeting behind closed doors since October to discuss the move. Monroe told stakeholders in January that a small negotiating team had been working to resolve a subset of “real contentious” issues. The Mountain West entities have suggested several governance changes important to their side of the footprint. (See SPP, Mountain West Resolving ‘Contentious’ Issues.)
Mountain West has said studies have shown participating in SPP’s markets and efficiently using the DC ties between the two footprints would yield annual savings of $80 million to $154 million for its members. The entities also expect to realize additional benefits from regional transmission planning and SPP’s other services.
SPP has estimated its current members could receive more than $500 million in total net benefits over the first 10 years of Mountain West’s membership through reduced administrative costs because of a larger customer rate base, adjusted production cost savings from east-west energy exchanges and capacity cost savings from increased load diversity.
The RTO projects it will take about two years to fully integrate the Mountain West entities as members, but it plans to begin reliability coordination services in late 2019.
SPP currently serves a 546,000-square-mile, 14-state region. Mountain West’s membership would add 165,000 square miles, 16,000 miles of transmission lines, 21 GW of generating capacity and parts of three more states (Arizona, Colorado and Utah) to the RTO’s footprint.
Mountain West, which primarily services Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska, began discussing RTO membership in 2013. It announced in January 2017 it was pursuing membership in SPP, and discussions entered a public phase in October. (See SPP, Mountain West Integration Work Goes Public.)
