IRVING, Texas — Taking the stage to welcome attendees to SPP’s Energy Synergy Summit, incoming CEO Lanny Nickell said the two-day event has been long in the planning.

“It’s something that we’ve been wanting to talk about for a long time,” he said during the March 3-4 event. “I’ve been in this industry a long time. I’ve seen a lot of change, but we’re changing at a rate that is faster than I’ve ever seen before, and that makes it exciting to be part of this industry.

“So that’s what we’re intending to talk about today. How can we align resources with the demand that we know is increasing?”

Exciting? With SPP already seeing changes in the resource mix from renewable sources? With thousands of megawatts of dispatchable generation retiring, as Nickell said? With load growth increasing at levels seldom seen?

The challenge, he told the 280 attendees — an SPP record for an external meeting — is infrastructure.

Case in point: SPP’s approval in November of a record breaking $7.65 billion transmission planning portfolio of 89 projects, including its first 765-kV project. (See SPP Board Approves $7.65B ITP, Delays Contentious Issue.)

“With all of the load growth we’re already seeing, the challenge is to have the resources we need. We need to add more, and we need to add more quicker. With the change in risk, we have to get ahead of the game. We have to add transmission. It’s coming, but it can’t get here quick enough,” Nickell said.

“The questions we have to answer, and it starts today, is how can we do this reliably? How can we do this affordably? How can we add the generation we need quicker? How can we add the transmission we need quicker? What can we do with the system that we have today? Those are the questions that have to get answered.”

“I think if we could go back like five years and we talked about [Texas’] economy, things started changing pretty quickly,” ERCOT COO Woody Rickerson said during a later panel discussion. “We thought, ‘Man, this is grid transformation. Focus is really accelerating.’ It was nothing compared to what’s going on now. All the reports, all the dashboards, everything we do is different now because you’ve got this energy component. And then on top of all that, you come in with 10,000 MW of data center load. … So, yeah, it’s kind of the Wild West of the grid right now. I think we’re going to see even five or 10 years of really rapid changes, and what we come out with is not going to be anything like what we have today.”

Morgan Scott, vice president of sustainability and global outreach for the Electric Power Research Institute, offered some pathways forward. She said flexibility is the key to meeting load growth, in addition to forecasting, stability and reliability, and adequate supply and delivery capacity.

This includes flexibility with the transmission system, where additional infrastructure can be slow in coming.

“As one person put it on a roundtable I was facilitating last year: ‘I’ve got to sweat my transmission assets as much as I can sweat those things. I have to squeeze as much capacity out of the transmission system as I can,’” she recalled. “This is the conversation that starts to get around [grid-enhancing technologies], right? How do we get these technologies onto the system that help us to take advantage of the system that is already built as is today?”

Scott used what she said was an ancient Greek proverb, often attributed to Warren Buffett, to make her case for continued infrastructure investment.

“Society prospers when old men plant trees that they’re never going to sit in the shade of,” she said. “The concept fits so right for me as we think about this particular moment in the power system and this industry. We’ve got to be making decisions and investments today in the grid that we’re not going to necessarily see the benefits of. … I encourage us to really think about what’s the power system that we need in the next 30 to 50 years, and how do we make those responsible decisions now?”

SPP’s incoming COO, Antoine Lucas, agreed during his panel’s discussion of how best to adapt to the new digital era. He said the grid operator is using its transmission planning process to ready itself for “many different circumstances.”

“We look at various different scenarios that give us the opportunity to identify needs that are consistent across those different futures, and we try to use that information to lead us to more of the no-regrets type of transmission plan under that circumstance,” he said. “If we’re going to recommend an investment, we know it’s going to address an issue or at least we’re highly confident that it’s going to address an issue on the system. The question just becomes the appropriateness of the scale of the project [minimizing] some of those risks or concerns, but that also puts us in the position to be able to meet the challenges and needs.”

Roger Freeman, head of power for Talus Renewables, provided a customer’s perspective, saying their engagement can be useful in designing the systems of the future.

“I think it’s useful that we’re having sort of a high-level conversation about system planning. That’s really important as we think about the big questions for how we structure our energy system,” he said. “I think as we sort of build the energy system of the future, that conversation needs to change a little bit to broaden out the range of options.

“So I would say to the regulators and others in the utilities in the room, ‘How do we sort of change the mindset so we can have sort of a more dynamic conversation,’ so it’s not just ‘Tell me what you want, I’ll build it and rate base it,’ but it’s ‘Here’s the different ways that you could build a system that you want to build,’” Freeman added.

Kim David, elected to the Oklahoma Corporation Commission in 2022 and now its chair, said she expected a boring job when she joined the OCC. Now, she says, “This is a pretty exciting time moving forward.”

“You guys also speak a different language, but being innovative and thinking outside the box,” she said. “Yes, we have to keep our reliability, and we have to make sure everything is used and useful and we protect our customers. But it is truly with new technology happening, I think this is a time to let the free market have the reins and come up with some innovative ideas to bring forward to us on how to put it together.”

“The main message here is we’re dealing with innovation,” said NextEra Energy Resources’ Mark Ahlstrom, who chairs SPP’s Future Grid Strategy Advisory Group. “Innovation is kind of like a fast form of evolution. It’s a very unstoppable force. We can shape it, we can’t just get in the way and say, ‘Stop.’ It’ll go either right through you or around you and find another way of accomplishing it. We really have to embrace this as an opportunity to innovate and figure out how we’re going to do that at many levels.”

Former Texas Public Utility Commissioner Will McAdams, who now runs his eponymous energy group and partners with a lobbying firm, recalled his days at the PUC and as its liaison with SPP. The experience was eye-opening.

“I got to see the Wild West, which was ERCOT, and then I got to see the opposite of the Wild West, which was SPP, and that was a world of free-wheeling, Libertarian, valued regulations,” he said. “Do you build it? We’ll figure out how to make it work together. That’s a tough world for an ISO/RTO manager to manage, and then you have SPP. It’s the land of the 16 kingdoms, the transmission owners, and the elders that rule it with an iron fist, and nobody wants to change that.

“And so that’s a great experiment of who’s going to win the race on this data center employment, who’s going to win the race in attracting large loads to their region and thus experience the benefits of the diverse risk cycle of tax base, economic development and job growth partnership,” McAdams added.

“There might be a happy medium between the Wild West and the people that make up that Wild West and the 16 kingdoms. How do you work within the needs of the utility to create the synergies between the load and the utility, to allow the opportunity to scale at the same time providing the reliability needs and, frankly, the cost allocation necessary to bring costs down at the same time as building out infrastructure to bring more loads? And I believe that is possible.”

Lucas shared McAdams’ optimism as he reflected on the conversations surrounding large loads.

“I hear a wide range of perspectives about it, from some that are excited about it but then there are others who say, ‘I just don’t want it, don’t need it,’” he said.

But wherever you stand, Lucas said, additional investment and transmission infrastructure will be needed to maintain grid reliability.

“That’s the numerator in the equation, but I think about these large loads as a real opportunity because to the extent we’re able to significantly increase the denominator in that equation, that might be our ticket to be able to fund the investments as necessary to maintain reliability and do it in a fashion that’s affordable,” he said. “So I would implore everyone here to think about the opportunity in front of us and how we may be able to take advantage of that opportunity to create some affordability as we get through this transition.”