The Bonneville Power Administration estimates it would need up to seven years and billions of dollars in upgrades to handle the 65 GW of transmission service requests in the queue, staff said during a Sept. 4 workshop.
The workshop is part of a series of public meetings the agency is hosting as part of its Grid Access Transformation Project (GAT).
BPA paused certain planning processes and launched the GAT program to consider changes following a surge of transmission service requests. The federal power agency’s 2025 transmission cluster study includes more than 65 GW of requests, compared with 5.9 GW in 2021. The requests exceed the total regional load predicted for the Pacific Northwest in 2034, according to the agency. (See BPA’s Proposed Tx Access Changes Prompt Questions of Industry Readiness.)
Conducting an actionable study would require the agency to “model unrealistic load increases or unrealistic generation dispatch patterns to achieve the load reverse balance that’s necessary to perform a power flow study,” said Abbey Nulph, manager of transmission commercial planning at BPA, during the workshop.
“Our best estimate is that the batches that we believe would not require unrealistic load or generation patterns would have us batching roughly 10 to 20 GW of batches,” Nulph said. “Using our current [Transmission Service Request Study and Expansion Process] timelines, it would take between seven and eight years to process just the existing queue. And while we were undergoing those studies, we would continue to be getting more requested.”
Alex Swerzbin, vice president of power marketing and transmission at NewSun Energy, asked about the six- to seven-year timeline, saying others in the industry have estimated the process to take between three to four years under a batch framework.
Nulph replied that even if BPA was able to process 65 GW, the result would be a “massive collection of plans of service.”
“And the host of plans of service that will come out of study of this size would likely necessitate several billion dollars more in upgrade,” Nulph added. “We do not have that access to capital.”
Some of the new proposed updates to planning processes include readiness criteria and a new Network Integration Transmission Service initiative where any new forecast increase of 13 MW or more during any year would require participation in commercial planning.
The agency also is contemplating offering interim service and moving toward proactive planning, meaning building ahead of transmission service requests, according to a July 9 workshop presentation. (See BPA Outlines Proposed Transmission Planning Reforms.)
‘Slings and Arrows’
NewSun CEO Jake Stephens also weighed in during the Sept. 4 discussion, contending that BPA should have continued processing requests under the current rules instead of issuing the pause. He noted the 2023 TSEP studied 15 GW, triggering “universal upgrades.”
“We would recommend go ahead and process the first 15 GW of the current queue without waiting and running a whole litigated process, which could take a long time and is probably pretty contentious, because we actually know right now that you can process at least 15 or 20 GW more,” Stephens said.
Nulph said BPA can process many requests but could run into issues that arose during the 2023 process, where a “large portion of our queue drops away because the plans of service are too expensive.”
“So, it feels like a waste of our time and our effort,” Nulph said. “Especially when we are relatively resource-constrained in our ability to perform these sorts of studies. We are wanting to spend our slings and arrows on the work that is the most effective for us. And our assessment at this point is that conducting the largest study we think we could will not result in actionable results at the other end.”
Stephens responded that the market and studies point to the need for more buildouts, while BPA is “sort of saying, ‘Well, we can’t build all this stuff that everybody needs, so we want to adopt policies to shrink everything back to a small-enough set that it doesn’t need all the upgrades that we all need.’ But we do need that.”
“It’s not what I’m saying,” Nulph said.
“I’ll clarify,” she added. A “vast portion” of requesters dropped out when BPA offered the Preliminary Engineering Agreements after the 2023 TSEP, Nulph said.
“And the cited reasons were that those projects were too expensive for them to proceed with,” Nulph said. “So, this isn’t a Bonneville assessment that we can’t afford to build these. It’s that the region is telling us they can’t afford these.”
Next steps in BPA’s GAT process include a customer-led workshop Sept. 10. Additionally, the agency plans to respond to customer comments from previous workshops in October.
BPA is also moving from a business practice process to a tariff proceeding process and will publish a webpage and host additional workshops on those proceedings, according to presentation slides.
