DENVER — Markets+ stakeholders will have little opportunity to ease up in coming months despite a wave of favorable developments for the market.

Those include FERC’s recent approval of the Markets+ tariff, funding agreement and a pair of compliance requests, as well as participants agreeing on most of the market protocols.

SPP has officially set Oct. 1, 2027, as the go-live date for Markets+, its centralized, day-ahead offering in the Western Interconnection. Between now and then, much will happen, with Sept. 1, 2025, emerging as a key date. That is the deadline for balancing authorities to join in time to be a part of the market when it goes live.

“It’s going to be really busy between now and Oct. 1 of 2027,” The Energy Authority’s Laura Trolese, chair of the Markets+ Participant Executive Committee, told RTO Insider on April 23. “The utilities and [independent power producers] within the BAs that are joining in the first tranche are going to need to get ready, register, figure out who their market participants are going to be and figure out a lot of different things to move forward with implementation. When a BA joins, now all the loads and resources within that BA are required to register and participate.”

Before then, SPP will begin designing and building the market’s systems and kicking off network and commercial modeling, while stakeholders will begin training on the RTO’s systems.

And with MPEC’s endorsement, the Markets+ Change User Forum (MCUF) will hold its first monthly meeting as Phase 2 gets serious. SPP staff said the MCUF, based on similar groups in previous market developments, will serve as an implementation forum for the Markets+ protocols.

“This is kind of exciting, because this is where it starts,” said Don Martin, SPP customer relations manager. “It is where you get our people and everybody’s people together. This is where your [energy management systems] team will be talking to these folks. This is where your IT folks will be talking or registering assets.”

The forum is holding its first virtual meeting May 6, five days after Phase 2 starts.

MPEC also endorsed a seams strategy and roadmap paper that lays out focus areas in the future development of polices and governing documents related to seams between Markets+ and neighboring markets and entities. It also documents a “desired end state” for market-to-market relationships with neighboring markets.

Stakeholders unanimously approved the recommendation.

The only motion that received a dissenting vote during the two-day meeting was a recommendation governing meeting attendance and the use of proxies from the Markets+ Interim Governance Task Force (MIGTF). Public interest organizations and other entities with small staffs pushed back against the recommendation that representatives on a working group or task force who miss three straight meetings or appoint a proxy for six straight meetings can be removed from the group by its chair. The MPEC and the Markets+ State Committee (MSC) would be excluded from that provision.

“Those groups that are maybe more capacity resource-constrained tend to rely heavily on proxies in order to maintain effective and consistent participation,” said Renewable Northwest’s Kavya Niranjan, who cast the lone “no” vote. “Our concern with this policy is not that we are not in disagreement with the intention. We feel that, because it can be overly prescriptive, that PIOs that are still trying to engage meaningfully might accidentally or unintentionally get caught up in the overly prescriptive nature of this policy.”

The MIGTF has debated the issue since August 2024, much to the consternation of its chair, Puget Sound Energy’s Jessica Zahnow, who said she just wanted to set clear expectations for attendance and participation.

“When our task force formed eight months ago, I got the list of the six items [to set expectations for recommendations] and I saw attendance policy. I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a slam dunk. That one’s going to be easy. Some of these other things are going to take some work, but this one will be easy,’” she recalled. “It hasn’t been easy, but we have learned a lot.”

Snohomish Public Utility District’s Joe Fina complimented the task force on its effort and their work developing a stakeholder-driven approval process, unlike those of other grid operators.

“I was very impressed with the interactions of the task force, the good faith that I think everyone was working under in trying to resolve the concerns that were issued,” he said. “I’m so glad to see kind of the end product here, after being aware of all of the process. I’m not aware in any of the other markets where they go down as deep into the working groups, and they have a similar thoughtful process, proxies and ability. I think that other markets will be looking at this as kind of the model as to how they deal with the similar issue and the work level.”

GHG, Other Protocols Endorsed

In a series of unanimous votes, MPEC approved more than a dozen-and-a-half chunks of the tariff’s remaining protocol language.

That included sections brought forward by the Markets+ Greenhouse Gas Task Force (MGHGTF), which is dealing with one of the more complex protocol sections. The task force began working on GHG pricing protocols in November 2024 after it completed GHG tracking and reporting protocols and developed an appendix providing guidance on creating and submitting mitigated energy offer calculations.

The MGHGTF plans to draft its final pieces of protocol language — focusing on unspecified-source imports and import interchange transactions — in the months ahead, while also ensuring the market’s implementation is consistent with state regulations.

“There are several things that we are continuing to tackle,” said the Public Generating Pool’s Mary Wiencke, who chairs the group. “I would not want this to be reflected as the GHG Task Force being behind. The GHG Task Force has been working very hard and diligently, but this is a new and novel design, so there are a lot of complex elements to figure out. We still do have some outstanding plan items and action items that we are continuing to work through it.”

She said the Washington State Department of Ecology has an open rulemaking on electricity markets, which has tightened the focus on the group’s work.

“Folks in Washington are very engaged in that process to make sure that what is being developed by the task force is consistent … in terms of the market design reflecting the state regulation and the state regulation reflecting the market design as well,” she said.

The MPEC agreed to reappoint all stakeholder group chairs and vice chairs through its Aug. 12 meeting in Portland. Trolese noted all stakeholder representatives were appointed to two-year terms in April 2023; this will allow a smoother transition when Phase 2 begins with the August meeting, she said.

The MPEC also endorsed three new members for the working groups:

• • Damon Skondin (Tucson Electric Power) for the vacant investor-owned utility seat on the Markets+ Transmission Working Group.
  • Richard Doying (Grid Strategies) and Caitlin Liotiris (Western Power Trading Forum) for the vacant independent seats on the Markets+ Seams Working Group.

Blank on Budget, PSCo Filing

The MSC, composed of regulators from 13 states, is asking for a $428,680 budget for 2025 to fund one full-time equivalent staffer at the Western Interstate Energy Board this year and retain the MSC’s consultants. The MSC said that will enable the regulators to continue engaging in the market’s development.

Eric Blank, chair of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission and previous chair of the MSC, told the MPEC the budget will be submitted to the Interim Markets+ Independent Panel for its approval.

Blank also said the PUC has a pending application from Xcel Energy’s Public Service Company of Colorado seeking cost recovery and other approvals to enter Markets+. PSCo filed its request in February. (See PSCo Seeks to Join SPP’s Markets+.)

“Although I can’t say much about pending litigation, I can say that the Colorado PUC is committed to getting a timely decision made to provide greater certainty to SPP and the Markets+ participants,” he said.