The Bonneville Power Administration is on track to enter the Western Energy Imbalance Market on May 3, despite lingering issues with market integration software, agency officials said Thursday.

“It is still very much full speed ahead as we continue to work through the outstanding milestones and progressing towards our May go-live date,” Nita Zimmerman, BPA’s chief business transformation officer, said during a stakeholder meeting.

The federal power marketing agency was originally scheduled to begin transacting in the WEIM on March 2, along with Avista and Tacoma Power. But after beginning parallel operations Dec. 1, BPA delayed entry by two months because of technical problems and customer training issues. The parallel production environment allows new participants to submit bids and base schedules, collect e-tags and learn how to adapt operations to real-time developments. (See BPA Postpones Western EIM Entry by 2 Months.)

“We managed through the slight delay, and we’ve made progress to meet the milestones necessary for participation, including resuming parallel operations [with the WEIM] on March 8,” Zimmerman said.

She said BPA on Wednesday submitted its WEIM “readiness attestation” to CAISO, the market’s operator, which will in turn submit the document to FERC.

“With this success achieved, there is still more work to be done,” Zimmerman said. “BPA will continue to test and implement the systems necessary to participate in the EIM.”

The outcome of that testing will be the subject of an April 19 meeting of BPA executives responsible for issuing a “go/no-go” decision on the May 3 entry date, said Mark Symonds, the agency’s director of commercial operations.

“That’s where we bring our executives together and make sure, from a functional readiness standpoint, we are in all-systems-go from a systems, process and people standpoint, to make sure that we have the level of confidence that we need to run our EIM operations on May 3,” Symonds said.

Elsa Chang, BPA’s EIM program manager, said the most “critical” problems to be addressed have to do with integration of the “sub-allocation” and outage management systems related to WEIM operations.

The problem with the sub-allocation system has been particularly thorny. That system is designed to allocate the costs and payments for WEIM settlements back to BPA customers. Testing has revealed discrepancies between CAISO settlement statements and the sub-allocation amounts, BPA’s Rasa Keanini said.

Chang said BPA expects to complete its work on the sub-allocation system by the May 3 WEIM go-live date but also has a contingency plan in place in case fixes provided by the software vendor fail to pass BPA’s testing by that date.

“We plan to have the work delivered no later than June 25, which is the day BPA issues our first EIM bill to our transmission customers,” she said.

Chang said BPA has also encountered “performance issues” with its WEIM outage management software, which went live March 8 when the agency re-entered parallel operations with the market.

“This system is necessary for BPA to participate in the EIM, so issues can potentially result in both safety and reliability problems,” Chang said, adding that BPA has “patched” the system and will continue to monitor it and resolve any problems.

Customer Concerns

Stakeholders on the call voiced concerns about what BPA will do if the software system issues have not been sufficiently addressed by the time BPA official meet on April 19 to make the “go/no-go” decision.

“What happens if things don’t, don’t go quite as well as we expect?” Adam Cornelius, principal utility analyst with Snohomish County Public Utility District in Washington, asked.

“That’s really a great point,” Symonds said, “and it’s one that we’re watching very closely and why we have been working very collaboratively with our vendor to clear the defects that get identified and be able to test the sub-allocation routine and not just validate the routine itself.”

Symonds said he expects BPA to make “significant progress” on that front ahead of the April 19 meeting.

“It is possible that things could go in a different direction,” Symonds said. “That’s why we’ve continued to reinforce our [WEIM] participation principles up and down the line for years — that we have the ability to manage our participation in the market.”

Ed Mount, director of power supply planning and operations at The Energy Authority, pressed the sub-allocation system issue, saying the allocations are “where the rubber hits the road” for his company’s customers.

“Is there a contingency plan for billing customers if there are still discrepancies that are being seen between the sub-allocation system logic and what you’re being billed with CAISO?” Mount asked.

Symonds described the complexity of that system logic and the importance of the quality of the metering data being fed into the system.

He said BPA would contact “selected” customers — mostly those at aggregated customer meter points — regarding the data over the next few weeks “so that we can tackle any of those issues that we think we are seeing now, rather than waiting until after go-live or even our first settlement statement to see it.”

“We also have different contingency plans that we can exercise along the way, in the event that we continue to have any issues with how those calculations come together,” he added.