Four Colorado utilities decided to join CAISO’s Energy Imbalance Market instead of SPP’s Western Energy Imbalance Service because of the economic benefits.

SPP has made its long-held interest in the West official by “calling on interested utilities and other customers” to help build a real-time market “that will meet the electricity needs of the Western Interconnection.”

SPP stakeholders approved changes to the RTO’s generator interconnection process to simplify what had become a burdensome process involving repetitive data.

SPP will this year begin providing reliability coordinator services to more than a dozen entities in the Western Interconnection.

SPP’s Market and Operations Policy Committee unanimously approved staff recommendations to revise the SPP-MISO Coordinated System Plan.

Talk of a Western RTO continued at the 11th annual gathering of the Western Power Issues Roundtable, after several shakeups in the Western Interconnection.

SPP announced it intends to serve as a reliability coordinator in the Western Interconnection by late 2019.

SPP CEO Nick Brown said the grid operator remains committed to making their membership proposal to Mountain West Transmission Group work, despite Xcel Energy’s surprise decision to pull out of the group and its pending integration into the RTO.

At the Gulf Coast Power Association’s annual spring conference, ERCOT CEO Bill Magness once again moderated a panel of his counterparts from around the country.

Grid Operators for the three RTOs vying to organize Western electricity markets faced off before an audience of utility regulators in what one state commissioner billed a “beauty pageant.”