PacifiCorp is hiring additional employees to prepare for CAISO’s Extended Day-Ahead Market in 2026, with staff expecting the launch will bring a few “scratches and bruises.”

Daniel Koppes, director of main grid operations at PacifiCorp, said during an EDAM workshop Nov. 17 that his department plans to hire a new team of eight engineers who will work seven days a week “to help analyze how our system is going to operate every single day, so that way we can optimize the market solution [and] help prevent curtailments.”

The new hires come as PacifiCorp develops new tools aimed at maintaining grid reliability under EDAM, Koppes said. Contrary to the existing real-time market, CAISO’s Western Energy Imbalance Market, EDAM requires PacifiCorp to analyze how its system will work 24 hours in advance.

“Because of the financial impacts of a 24-hour ahead, every change that we make is going to cost more money than the current market does if … it creates curtailments,” Koppes said.

Koppes’ department will hire more staff “to look at how did we do yesterday … so we know how we can do better. So, we’ve hired one, and we’re working on hiring a couple more business analysts to look at every day after the fact,” Koppes said.

Other PacifiCorp departments have staffed up or are doing so, including energy supply management, transmission services, business and accounting.

“The added staff that we’ve hired will allow us to stand a second operational desk,” said Parker Floyd, generation dispatch manager.

“We’re in the process of rebuilding our small control space into a slightly larger control room,” Floyd said. “With more responsibility and more full-time employees, we need more space, but we also need space to house and protect cyber assets that we’ll need.”

PacifiCorp is expected to begin participating in EDAM on May 1, 2026. Some models estimate EDAM will bring approximately $900 million in annual savings, and more than $300 million for PacifiCorp customers, according to a company presentation. (See ‘Aggressive’ EDAM Schedule ‘Going Smoothly’ for PacifiCorp, PGE.)

‘Sticking the Landing’

But to reach that point, PacifiCorp has a lot of work to do.

“My team is spending an enormous amount of time working on the software upgrades that are necessary to implement EDAM,” said Kris Bremer, transmission customer services managing director. “Specifically, in my team, it’s the customer portals that are going to be used for scheduling for various activities on our transmission system. That is a massive upgrade to what we’ve done in the past.”

Getting PacifiCorp’s legacy customers ready for EDAM is another challenge, because not all those customers fall under the company’s tariff and operate under old transmission agreements, Bremer noted.

Making sure those customers know how to schedule and how their transmission rights can be configured with EDAM is “also a big deal we’re working through right now,” Bremer said.

Dave Novom, manager of energy accounting and jurisdictional loads, said his department has hired one additional person who focuses on validating meter data and “working to make sure that we can submit actual meter data for settlements.”

In addition to PacifiCorp, five other entities have signed implementation agreements with EDAM, with more likely.

“With the expanded footprint, I think we know it’s going to become more complex, especially around optimization and cost allocation,” said Joseph Holland, finance and accounting manager.

“One of our major settlements initiatives, or workflows, right now is to enhance our … vendors’ ability to shadow settlements in EDAM,” Holland said. “This shadowing allows us to ensure that the CAISO settlement is accurate before we suballocate those charges on to customers to avoid having to rework. That’s one of the major areas where staffing is critical for us, adding new folks early in the process, which we’ve done.”

While the EDAM implementation mostly is running smoothly, two areas — CAISO integration and software upgrades — have run into some issues, according to Kerstin Rock, EDAM implementation director.

“It’s all very connected, in some cases, for really trying to orchestrate almost the cascading implication on the different applications,” Rock said. “So, at this point … we have risks that we’re managing. They’re not high-level risks. We have a few issues, which are generally related to timing.”

Rock said she expects the issues to be fixed, adding “I’m not going to sit here and pretend that we plan to stick our landing perfectly.”

“We are working on sticking the landing, and I’m confident that we will do so,” Rock said. “We may come out of it with a few little scratches and bruises and maybe some unkempt hair, a little bit overtired. … As someone in charge of the implementation, I have confidence that we will get there, confidence in our partners.”