The SPP working group responsible for recommending changes to the RTO’s Tariff decided last week to form a task force to consider developing a payment plan for members who face debts as a result of the Z2 credit resettlements.
Westar Energy’s Dennis Reed, the Regional Tariff Working Group’s chair, said a task force’s narrow focus would help determine the best approach for a Z2 resettlement payment plan. The task force will work with SPP staff and report to the RTWG, which will email a request for member participation.
The Z2 project is an effort to design software that would properly credit and bill transmission customers for system upgrades under Tariff attachment Z2. The problem has been trying to avoid over-compensating project sponsors and include a way to “claw back” revenues from members who owe SPP money for other reasons. Accounting for transfers of reservations has also been a challenge. The project is scheduled to be completed in 2016 after years of delay. (See SPP Z2 Project Team Still Grappling with Problem’s Size.)
The RTWG was briefed on the current estimated cost of creditable upgrades involving generator interconnections, transmission service and sponsored upgrades: $721 million for 142 upgrades, with the costs borne by 68 initial upgrade sponsors. A separate member task force will work with SPP staff to review and verify the results.
Canadian Transactions
The RTWG made slight edits to a Tariff revision request involving future transactions with Canadian utilities.
With the Integrated System’s integration into SPP, the RTO will now have interconnections with SaskPower, whose affiliate will become a market participant, and Manitoba Hydro, which has also expressed interest in market participation. Manitoba Hydro requested that SPP develop Tariff language that recognizes the U.S.-Canada border as the point of delivery and point of receipt for transactions involving Canadian entities.
The revision request (TRR 110: Point-of-Delivery and Point-of-Receipt Transactions at the Canadian Border) will provide legal recognition that satisfies federal and provincial requirements and allows Canadian entities to export energy in the U.S. without seeking approval from the U.S. Department of Energy. The revision would set the energy’s border point-of-delivery at an interconnection between a transmission provider’s facility and the Canadian utility’s transmission facility.
Transmission Working Group
Meeting earlier in the week, SPP’s Transmission Working Group discussed three potential SPP-MISO interregional projects and whether their construction will create new reliability needs.
The group approved SPP staff’s review of system constraints for use in the regional review of the three projects. Staff will identify “least-cost” projects to mitigate any thermal needs, reporting study results back to the working group in August.
The projects include construction of a 345-kV line between Nebraska and Kansas, a series reactor on a 115-kV line in northeast Louisiana and the rebuild of a 138-kV line south from Shreveport to Wallace Lake. They have been recommended for approval in the SPP-MISO Coordinated System Plan study.
The group also approved a flowgate assessment report and reviewed revision requests 67 and 71, Firm Service with Redispatch Clean Up and Revisions to Attachment D and Section 19.2, respectively. The group decided to wait until its next meeting to finalize any recommendations of the two RRs.
— Tom Kleckner
