By Rich Heidorn Jr.

SPP’s Board of Directors rejected a recommendation to create a short-term reliability unit commitment (RUC) study as part of the intra-day RUC process (Revision Request 49).

The study would provide results for 15-minute intervals, allowing operators to make unit commitments with more granularity than the current one-hour study. SPP staff said it would reduce the number of real-time manual commitments.

The study won the backing of the Markets and Operations Policy Committee last month but ran into stiff opposition last week from representatives of Golden Spread Electric Cooperative and Nebraska Public Power District, who said they feared the new tool might exacerbate losses they are suffering as a result of SPP’s dispatch of their quick-start units.

The quick-start units, which cost at least twice as much as regular combustion turbines, can be at full capacity in five minutes or less.

Golden Spread said that SPP should first fix its real-time balancing market software so that it recognizes quick-start resources as always “online” and available to the market. When the units are dispatched manually by operators through the RUC process instead of economic dispatch, they cannot set prices in the real-time market.

“So they just get the market price — which normally is much lower than the actual price — and need to be made whole,” Ron Thompson of Nebraska Public Power District said in written comments on the proposal. “If there is [an] issue and the unit does not perform as intended, the ‘make whole’ payment may be less or potentially not occur and the unit owner will be subject to much higher operating cost than what the market paid.”

At times, Golden Spread’s quick-start 168-MW Antelope units near Abernathy, Texas, are covering half of SPP’s regulation, Mike Wise, Golden Spread’s senior vice president of commercial operation and transmission, told the committee.

Wise said starts for the 18 Wärtsilä reciprocating engines at Antelope increased to almost 13,000 between March 1 and Dec. 3, 2014, compared with about 3,000 starts during the same time period in 2013, before the start of the Integrated Marketplace, a four-fold increase. About 41% of the starts in 2015 resulted from RUC instructions by SPP operators.

“They shouldn’t be getting RUC’ed at all,” Wise said. “They should be dispatched by the day-ahead or real-time market.”

Wise said SPP should create a ramping product to create the proper economic signals for quick-start and other fast-ramping resources. “This market should have a ramping product that is the envy of the country. We have got the wind resources that are the envy of the country,” Wise said. The short-term study “is not the answer. The ramping product that we are working on is the answer.”

One director asked about deferring to the new tool until the ramping product is developed. “I don’t want to make a bad situation worse,” he said.

Richard Dillon, director of market design, said it will likely be months before there is a proposed ramping product for members to consider and that once approved, it will take considerable software development to implement.

Chief Operating Officer Carl Monroe said the tool would automate “something we’re already doing manually. It doesn’t change [Golden Spread’s] situation at all.”

With the rejection, the measure was returned to the MOPC.