HENDERSON, Nev. — Time and complexity are among the key obstacles to transmission planning in the Western Interconnection, WECC learned from a series of recent interviews conducted with industry stakeholders.

WECC struck “gold” from the details it gleaned from the interviews, Branden Sudduth, WECC vice president of reliability planning and performance analysis, told the organization’s Board of Directors during its quarterly meeting Sept. 14. The process was designed to identify the biggest challenges to transmission planning in the West — and how WECC could help overcome them. 

In June, the board asked WECC staff to perform a “gap analysis” on the challenges and report on how the organization could “add value” to transmission planning in its footprint, which covers 14 Western states, the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia and northern portion of Baja California in Mexico.

WECC interviewed 26 stakeholders for the project, including merchant transmission developers, state and federal regulators, utility planners, independent power producers, planning consultants and regional planners. Details about interviewees were kept confidential, Sudduth said.

Sudduth said interviewees noted that some regional projects have been in the works for about 15 years.

“Some of those projects, when they were first proposed, had a very specific purpose, and because it’s been 15 years later and a lot of the goals of the state [and] goals of the utilities have changed, the purpose for those projects has also changed. But they’ve been flexible and adaptive and have been able to incorporate some of those changing objectives into those plans,” Sudduth said.

Sudduth ticked off the other major challenges cited by stakeholders:

• The inability to identify “major” interregional transmission projects and frustration with the FERC Order 1000 process.
• Concerns about how to adapt to potential changes stemming from recent FERC Notices of Proposed Rulemaking on transmission planning (RM21-17) and generator interconnection processes (RM22-14).
• The division between transmission and resource planning. It’s “quicker to get resources planned, sited and built than it is to get major transmission projects built,” Sudduth said. “So that timeline alone creates some challenges in terms of ensuring that we have enough transmission to meet the aggressive clean energy targets that we’re seeing in a lot of states in the West.”
• The length of generator interconnection queues. Utilities expend a lot of effort processing queue requests, Sudduth said, and various entities have adopted different methodologies, such as the cluster or serial approach to processing. “These create some interesting and unique challenges when it comes to understanding what the transmission needs are based on those generator interconnection queues.”
• Siting, permitting and cost allocation, which Sudduth acknowledged can’t necessarily be lumped together given the different challenges associated with each. For instance, permitting in the West can be difficult because of the amount of federally owned land, while cost allocation can be problematic due to inconsistent treatment across jurisdictions.
• Workforce shortages, particularly among transmission planning engineers. Workforce issues were a running theme at WECC’s two-day meeting Sept. 13-14. (See WECC Forum Elicits Hopes, Fears About Future of Electric Sector.)

Centralization, Optimization

WECC also probed the interviewees on potential solutions to the transmission challenges.

“The RTO concept came up a lot,” Sudduth said. “I know there are a lot of different entities that are looking at multistate RTOs to help bridge some of the gaps that we currently see in transmission planning, and especially for those larger interstate transmission projects.”

WECC also heard about other centralized planning options, “without a lot of specificity around what that means or who would be performing that,” Sudduth said. He said many respondents felt that there was more planning coordination in the past, but that cooperation seemed to drop off over the last 20 years.

“Maybe it’s the [lack of] ability to come together and dedicate the time to some of the pre-planning coordination that’s necessary for some of these larger projects,” Sudduth said.

Respondents pointed to other potential solutions, including:

• Integrated resource and transmission planning. “There’s this tension between resource planning and transmission planning, and the thought is if we could get those more closely aligned and coordinated, both at a wide-area level, but even within different entities within different companies … it might really help.”
• Simplified and expedited approval processes over the long term.
• Optimization before cost allocation, which Sudduth described as the desire of some stakeholders to explore what it would take to “optimize” the performance of the regional transmission system before making decisions about specific projects.

Recs for WECC

Sudduth said a top recommendation was for WECC to expand its existing tools, models and data sets from a 10-year to 20-year time frame.

“So [there is] a lot of support in WECC developing 20-year models to help support this type of planning activity, and this was one that we’ve actually started having conversations with the regional planning groups around; it’s already gaining a lot of momentum. I’m excited to see that there’s some potential here already to expand what we currently do,” Sudduth said.

Stakeholders’ other recommendations for WECC included:

• Performing a “top-down” analysis of interconnection-wide transmission needs based on overall resource changes, as opposed to the more typical “bottom-up” approach that goes with transmission projects designed to address a local need.
• Coordination at key “touch points” along the transmission planning process. “One of WECC’s strengths is the ability to bring together subject matter experts from around the interconnection to have conversations to coordinate on some of these plans,” Sudduth said.
• Providing an “independent voice” on planning issues.

A recommendation that WECC play a role in “stronger centralized regulation” prompted WECC board member James Avery to ask: “What was the vision there? Because we’re not the regulator.”

“This could be anything from developing reliability standards to helping standardize some of these processes, to working with different state regulators trying to maybe identify possible opportunities for more common processes [and] common standards along the way,” Sudduth said.

Board member Joe McArthur asked Sudduth how stakeholders thought an RTO could improve the transmission planning process.

“I’m not sure how to phrase my question: Does an RTO speed that up, or just provide more focus on the approval process?” McArthur asked.

“I think [for] different components of that [it does speed up the process]. So, if you have an RTO that has a centralized cost allocation process or something like that, it might help in that regard. In terms of maybe the land permitting, siting, that kind of thing, I’m not sure,” Sudduth said.

WECC’s next steps will be to document the insights from the interviews and offer stakeholders and board members a proposal on “the direction we’d like to go,” Sudduth said. Staff must also evaluate WECC’s legal limitations on acting on the recommendations. “We know there’s things that we just cannot do,” he said.

WECC plans to provide an update on the effort at the board’s next meeting in December.