The Western Power Pool has named industry veteran Sarah Edmonds as its new president and CEO, a role in which she will be responsible for furthering the aspirations of WPP’s Western Resource Adequacy Program (WRAP) throughout much of the Western Interconnection.
“We are truly fortunate to have retained Sarah Edmonds because she brings exactly the right mixture of experience, credibility, and integrity to build on the WPP’s strong foundation, and we are confident she can move it forward with purpose and innovation,” WPP Chairman Bill Drummond said in a March 24 statement.
Edmonds is currently director of transmission and reliability services at Portland General Electric, a job she plans to leave April 18, WPP said. Her prior roles included serving as vice president and general counsel at PacifiCorp Transmission.
Edmonds has been a key player in designing WRAP and in other organizational efforts in the Western grid, including development of the governance structure of the Western Energy Imbalance Market (WEIM).
Sarah Edmonds has been named the new CEO of Western Power Pool. | © RTO Insider LLC“Her move is seen as an important continuation of her extensive work on regional grid matters,” the WPP statement said.
Edmonds said in the statement she is looking forward to “teaming up with the WPP’s Board and staff to propel the organization into the next stage of excellence to meet the needs and aspirations of the Western Power Pool membership.”
Edmonds will replace outgoing President Frank Afranji, who is retiring after leading the organization for four years and establishing the WRAP. (See Retiring WPP Head Foresees Increased Collaboration on Western RA.)
Earlier this year, the Northwest Power Pool rebranded itself as the Western Power Pool, signifying its expanding reach across the Western Interconnection.
What was once a member-run organization focused mainly on grid reliability in the Pacific Northwest and Intermountain regions, Portland, Ore.-based WPP spent the past two years growing south and east.
WPP has been developing WRAP since 2020, initially to address concerns that Northwest utilities have been unknowingly drawing on the same shrinking pool of reliability resources, but interest in the effort spread to other parts of the West.
The WRAP, which is slated to launch a “nonbinding” iteration in the third quarter of this year, has attracted participants in an area spanning from British Columbia south to Arizona and east into South Dakota. Stage 1 of the WRAP will include 26 participants that together represent a summer peak load of about 67,000 MW and a winter peak of more than 65,000 MW.
In creating the WRAP, WPP has also been forced to repurpose itself as an organization. Once the WRAP enters its “binding” phase in 2023, the program and WPP will become subject to federal oversight and FERC rules.
Anticipating those requirements, WPP has moved to restructure its governance and prepare to adopt some elements of an RTO, such as the appointment of an independent board of directors. WPP has created an RA Participants Committee and will establish a Committee of States to ensure that utility regulators have a voice in discussions related to the WRAP. (See RA Program will Require Restructuring of NWPP.)
Edmonds has played a leading role in those efforts.
WPP has not signaled intentions to expand the WRAP’s offerings beyond resource adequacy but appears increasingly as a possible platform for incrementally developing a Western RTO — one that would compete with CAISO’s stalled regionalization efforts, the ISO’s well-established WEIM, and SPP’s nascent RTO West and Western Energy Imbalance Service.
WPP last year selected SPP to operate the technical aspects of the WRAP, providing the market’s forward-showing functions, modeling and system analytics, and real-time operations.
The WPP board selected Edmonds after a months-long search for an experienced industry professional with “demonstrated knowledge of the increasingly complex regional and interregional grid issues faced by the Western U.S. and Western Canada,” it said.
Edmonds “has stood out amongst her peers in helping to steer the development the Western Resource Adequacy Program development effort,” Debra Smith, CEO of Seattle City Light, said in the statement. “Her keen mind and expertise in utility regulatory and governance concepts, and her relationships across the landscape of stakeholders will be a tremendous asset to the WPP and its membership.”
“Nobody is better positioned to steer the organization through the WRAP implementation into the binding program and whatever comes next,” Smith said.