The Bonneville Power Administration is not planning to acquire any major energy resources but is taking steps to ensure it’s ready in case those predictions change, BPA staff said during a presentation of the agency’s 2024 Resource Program on Jan. 14.

“Until we have a little more certainty about what the load obligations will be placed on us under our new long-term power sales contracts that are under development, at this juncture, we’re not planning to acquire any major resources,” Suzanne Cooper, BPA senior vice president of power services, said during a webinar hosted by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council.

“But we’re taking steps to prepare in the event that we do need to acquire resources and augment the system,” Cooper added.

The comments came as BPA staff presented the agency’s 2024 Resource Program, which analyzes potential system needs and available resources. The biennial program study examines uncertainty in loads, water supply, natural gas prices and electricity market prices to develop least-cost portfolios to help meet BPA’s obligations.

For the 2024 program, BPA ran various sensitivities, including adding limits on access to the power market, to assess needs and potential solutions.

“Not surprisingly, we continue to rely heavily on energy efficiency, demand response and market purchases to meet BPA needs throughout all of the sensitivities,” said Allie Mace, manager of market analysis and policy.

Ryan Egerdahl, manager of long-term power planning, said BPA plans to publish the 2024 Resource Program document later this month and will start work on the 2026 program “basically immediately,” with an expected publish date in September 2026.

Additionally, based on comments from stakeholders during the development of the 2024 program, BPA will work on improving modeling capabilities in the next resource program by including additional assumptions, Egerdahl said.

Potential enhancements include assessing the capacity metric under extreme weather and low water to account for longer-duration extreme weather events than BPA has usually accounted for.

Extreme weather events are “lasting longer than three days, which has been our age-old assumption,” Egerdahl said.

“So, we’re considering having a longer-duration extreme weather event, and maybe looking at different water conditions like happened a year ago in January 2024 where the event was like five plus days and we had really low water,” he added.

Other enhancements include:

• • Reintroducing the balancing reserves study to Needs Assessment;
  • Connecting resource solutions to [Western Resource Adequacy Program] forward showing position;
  • Including additional candidate resource options;
  • Refining and refreshing characteristics for candidate resources, including performance of renewables;
  • Enhancing linkages between resource solutions, market assessment and needs assessment modeling.