By Tom Kleckner
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — SPP staff agreed last week to bring stakeholders a strawman proposal addressing concerns over the RTO’s transmission planning policy for energy-only resources.
Under current rules, capacity resources must go through transmission-service study (TSS) processes, while wind farms and other energy resources can bypass the TSS process and participate in the market, often creating transmission congestion. Stakeholders said the discrepancy creates uncertainty regarding future resource development as well as concerns over the fairness of cost allocation.
“It will take some time … to bring you something that will be a good strawman for you to start poking holes at,” COO Carl Monroe told the Strategic Planning Committee on Thursday, offering to deliver an update at its January meeting.
Staff will attempt to define the treatment of capacity and energy-only resources in the long-term planning process, taking into consideration reliability, public policy and economic concerns. It may also work to create incentives to generation-interconnection customers to proactively pursue upgrades needed to improve the deliverability of energy-only resources, and possibly develop a mechanism to treat all resources as firm capacity.
Antoine Lucas, SPP’s director of transmission planning, said things changed when tax incentives led to a rush of wind energy on the RTO’s system.
“Once the markets developed, we started running into blurred lines between what’s firm and what’s non-firm capacity,” he said. “It used to be black and white. If it’s a capacity resources, it was a firm service. You issued physical curtailments, with priority going to those firm resources. That’s not the most economical way to handle resources.”
Dogwood Energy’s Rob Janssen agreed with the need for a strategic vision, saying cost-allocation problems that have cropped up in recent years are “issues of [SPP’s] success.”
“We had a goal to build a robust transmission system, and we built it out to accommodate 12 to 15 GW of wind,” he said. “We made it work, but we haven’t stopped to re-evaluate our goals and needs now, and we’re seeing the cracks in the system. We need to step back and clearly identify our goals. How much more renewables do we need? Do we want to pay for those?”
SPC Chair Mike Wise, of Golden Spread Electric Cooperative, thanked the committee for the robust discussion, saying it was “pulling the scabs off several issues.”
“Little things can be dealt with here and there, but we need to keep the overall strategic picture in mind,” he said. “Let’s not just resolve this issue, but let it take us into the next world.”
