FERC approved SPP’s tariff for Markets+ with minor modifications in what the RTO’s staff described as a “home run” during the Markets+ Participant Executive Committee’s meeting Jan. 21.
FERC conditionally approved Southwest Power Pool’s tariff for Markets+ on Jan. 16, marking a significant milestone likely to ramp up competition with CAISO’s Extended Day-Ahead Market.
The order came with two conditions, including a requirement that SPP make a compliance filing within 30 days.
Paul Suskie, SPP’s executive vice president of regulatory policy and general counsel, noted during the executive committee’s meeting that the compliance filing requires SPP to add six sentences to the tariff and delete one.
“I’m going to repeat that: addition of six sentences and the deletion of one, out of a 650-page tariff,” Suskie said. “Pretty significant accomplishment.”
Specifically, FERC asked for modifications to sections in the tariff dealing with transmission availability and transmission opt-out mechanism, duration and communication of opt-outs, Markets+ transmission contributor and mitigation methodology for resource aggregation, according to Suskie.
“Then last was a deletion of a duplicate that we acknowledged was an unintended duplicate in the filing,” Suskie said.
SPP and the SPP Market Monitor also must file informational progress reports to FERC every six months to provide updates on market developments.
Suskie said after reading and rereading the order, “I give it a home run with 10 feet to spare. So, a great success.”
Steve Wright, SPP strategic planning committee member, said the FERC approval is “a really big moment” and that consumers will be better off as a result.
“Because what has happened here is choice has been created, and when there is choice, there is competition,” Wright said. “And we’ve already seen the impacts of the competitive element that Markets+ has offered in the West just over the course of the last 18 months.”
The commission said it expects Markets+ will provide its participants with “important economic and reliability benefits” and help them manage the impact of “increasing levels of variable energy resources, load growth and extreme weather events in the region.”
The order comes nearly six months after the commission issued the RTO a deficiency letter outlining 16 problems it needed to address in the tariff, which it filed last March after an intensive stakeholder process.
The decision indicates that SPP sufficiently addressed most of those deficiencies, with FERC asking the RTO to provide clarity where the tariff “lacks specificity on key points,” as Commissioner Judy Chang noted in a concurrence, such as in protocols covering “market and resource dispatch mechanics to account for state greenhouse gas programs and the ability for resources to be aggregated when participating” in the market.
SPP anticipates executing Phase 2 funding agreements soon. FERC must approve the agreements, after which SPP can go to the bank and obtain the financing necessary to fund Phase 2. The process may take up to two months, SPP staff said.
