SPP staff will bring a document before the Board of Directors and Members Committee next week that sets terms and conditions for new and existing members adding their Western Interconnection facilities under the RTO’s tariff.

The document applies to participants in the grid operator’s Western Energy Imbalance Services (WEIS) market, which went live Feb. 1, and who may be contemplating full RTO membership. (See WEIS Market ‘First Step’ to Full RTO Membership.)

“SPP West sets up a foundation to build on that and add additional parties,” Bruce Rew, SPP’s senior vice president of operations, told the Strategic Planning Committee during its July 14 meeting.

“There’s a lot of interest in the RTOs in the West,” he said, pointing to recent directives in Colorado and Nevada that transmission owners join an RTO by 2030. (See Xcel Delays Joining EIM to Examine Options.) “This gives us something to build on. Building on it is a lot cheaper than starting from scratch.”

Assuming board approval, the terms and conditions will only be valid until April 15, 2022. West parties intending to financially commit to the RTO will execute another commitment agreement before that date, with a projected go-live date of March 1, 2024.

The document would establish a single balancing authority encompassing the Western Area Power Administration Colorado-Missouri and Upper Great Plains West BAs. The new SPP BA would become a member of the Northwest Power Pool Reserve Sharing Group.

SPP’s Integrated Marketplace would solve for a single market solution in both BAs across the four DC ties linking the two interconnections. A single FERC Order 1000 planning process would be used in both footprints, and grandfathered service agreements would be converted to SPP service under the RTO’s current process.

Two of the ties are fully subscribed by grandfathered agreements, and a third is nearing the same condition. Rew said a DC tie task force has been formed to work through those issues, and it will present its findings in the fall.

“We know all the reservations. We’re working with those parties to determine what would be appropriate for SPP moving forward,” he said. “The DC ties are an important aspect of how this will operate.”

The document was hammered out by staff and SPP’s Western stakeholders during monthly Members Forum meetings designed to reach agreement on necessary governing document and operational changes necessary for RTO membership. Rew said stakeholders reviewed every page of the SPP tariff and that the terms and conditions have been reviewed by the Regulatory State Commission.

Seven WEIS participants — Basin Electric Power Cooperative, Deseret Generation and Transmission Cooperative, Municipal Energy Agency of Nebraska, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, WAPA Colorado River Storage Project, WAPA Rocky Mountain Region and WAPA Upper Great Plains — are evaluating SPP West membership. Colorado Springs Utilities will join the WEIS next April and is also considering RTO membership.

SPP cites an independent study in saying that WEIS participants’ RTO membership will save them $49 million annually: $24.2 million in new savings for current members, and $25.1 million in savings for new Western participants.

The SPC endorsed the document during last week’s meeting.

The committee also endorsed eight of nine recommendations, most of them unanimously, related to SPP’s transmission owner selection process for competitive projects. Only a motion to reduce the incentive points used to grade applications, from 100 to 50, failed to pass, falling 3-8 with three abstentions.

Other endorsed recommendations included setting parameters for the scoring methodology’s implementation, clarifying cost terms and cost estimates, and adding greater transparency to the process by developing a list of items not to be treated as confidential.

A task force working since January to improve SPP’s selection process identified 35 process improvements and issues that have been combined into nine key areas. It will continue its analysis as well as preparing language for revision requests and FERC filings. The team plans to bring a final recommendation to the October governance meetings.