FERC on Nov. 4 accepted SPP’s tariff revisions that add a winter season resource adequacy requirement for load-responsible entities, effective Jan. 1 (ER24-2397).
The commission said the requirement and its associated deficiency payment provide an incentive that will help ensure LREs proactively procure and maintain sufficient capacity during the winter season. SPP’s proposal extends its summer season resource adequacy (RA) requirement into the winter, replacing the existing winter obligation.
FERC said SPP’s tariff revision addressed its November 2023 rejection of the grid operator’s first filing. The RTO added language clarifying that a resource can only be used to meet the RA requirement if the LRE “expects [it] will be available for the duration of the [season]” and has “no knowledge [that the resource] will become unavailable.”
SPP’s new language included an exception for authorized outages, as long as the outage or outages do not exceed 30 days of either season.
Protesters argued that the first revision didn’t include a requirement that resources in an LRE’s workbook are expected to be available. LREs could purposefully include generators they knew would be offline during the season, undermining resource adequacy, the protesters said.
The commission disagreed with the SPP Market Monitoring Unit’s contention that the lack of a definition for “forced outage” renders authorized outage’s definition ambiguous and the filing unjust and unreasonable. It pointed to SPP’s argument that forced outages, though not explicitly defined in the tariff, are not studied and therefore cannot fall within the definition of authorized outages.
“The definition states that authorized outages will be studied by SPP as the balancing authority,” FERC said. “The definition of authorized outages also only encompasses those outages that have received authorization from SPP and provides that the balancing authority does not authorize forced outages.”
The commission noted that SPP extended the expectation of availability that previously applied only to the summer RA requirement, which it previously accepted. The RTO also imposed additional requirements, FERC said, in rejecting the MMU’s argument that the tariff must include further detail to ensure that SPP and its stakeholders know which situations disqualify a resource from the expectation of availability.
“Having found SPP’s proposal just and reasonable,” FERC said, it didn’t need to “consider alternative proposals” in the proceeding.
SPP added the winter resource adequacy requirement after increasing its planning reserve margin, saying the obligation was the culmination of a large amount of work by several stakeholder groups. (See “Board, RSC Endorse Winter Obligation,” SPP Board/Members Committee Briefs: July 24-25, 2023.)
