The Bonneville Power Administration will delay its entry into the Western Energy Imbalance Market (WEIM) by two months to work out technical and training issues, the federal power marketing agency said Thursday.
BPA was scheduled to begin trading in the WEIM on March 2 but is now pushing its “go-live” date to May 3, citing customer requests for more testing and training on the computer systems being used to integrate the agency’s operations into the market.
Speaking Thursday during an agency workshop, Chief Business Transformation Officer Nita Zimmerman said the “short delay” provides BPA with additional time “to ensure the most successful go-live outcome” and “to appropriately address some of the remaining functionality needed for some of the systems that we’re still bringing online.”
Zimmerman cited “continued challenges” with metering data, outage management, market settlement allocation and billing among its customer base of publicly owned utilities. Early participants in the WEIM have cautioned potential members on the complexity of integrating into the CAISO-operated market and the high level of “discipline” needed to prepare for joining. (See PacifiCorp Offers Lessons for Future EIM Participants.)
“Building in this additional time does demonstrate the care and rigor that we’re taking — along with our vendors — in bringing this initiative along,” Zimmerman said.
But Zimmerman and EIM Program Manager Roger Bentz both assured BPA customers that the agency is “pedal to the metal” and “continuing full-throttle” in its efforts to meet the May 3 timeline.
Bentz pointed to the progress BPA has made in implementing WEIM systems and practices over the past two months, including commencing parallel operations with the market on Dec. 1. The parallel production environment provides new participants the ability to practice under real market conditions, allowing them to submit bids and base schedules, collect e-tags and learn how to adapt operations to real-time developments.
BPA has also successfully tested end-to-end transfers with two adjacent WEIM entities and finished testing the software that will allow it to “donate” transmission capacity to WEIM operations.
Additionally, the agency has also fully staffed and trained its EIM entity scheduling coordinator and operations desks, Bentz said.
Bentz said he was unsure what impact BPA’s postponement would have on Avista and Tacoma Power, the two other entities slated to join the WEIM on March 2.
“The latest information we have [is] they are likely to stay with their current schedule of March 2,” he said.
“The Tacoma Power team is quickly doing an analysis today and should have more details [Friday],” utility spokesperson Rebekah Anderson told RTO Insider.
Avista did not respond to an inquiry about the effect of BPA’s delay on its WEIM timeline.
If the two utilities stick to their current timelines, BPA will be modeled out of parallel operations early next month and then rejoin in early March, Bentz said.
