Born in Wartime, Southwest Power Pool Marks 75 Years

Southwest Power Pool built a cafe at its new headquarters as a way of enticing employees to stay on campus during leisure hours.

The Southwest Power Pool, a wartime baby that had growing pains through the atomic age and matured into one of the nation’s largest coordinators of the electric grid, turned 75 years old today.

Don’t expect retirement any time soon.

The federally regulated not-for-profit regional transmission organization, which describes itself as an air-traffic controller for the power grid, aids in coordinating operations by utilities in 14 states. The 60,000 miles of transmission lines it oversees serve nearly 18 million households from Louisiana to Montana, and its headquarters have been in Little Rock since its inception shortly after the World War II attack on Pearl Harbor.

The organization celebrated with a 75th anniversary dinner in late October at the Little Rock Marriott Downtown, with President and CEO Nick Brown acknowledging “nearly 300 stakeholders from across our 14-state footprint, including Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Colette Honorable.”

Noting SPP’s role in overseeing the electric grid, maintaining service during bad weather and times of power plant and transmission line failures, Brown said that reliability is Job 1. “We exist to help our members keep the lights on, today and in the future.” Without its members, including 16 investor-owned utilities, 14 municipal companies, eight state agencies and 13 independent power producers, Brown said “we would not be where we are today.”

Guests at the dinner received a copy of a handsome 200-page hardbound history commissioned for the anniversary, “The Power of Relationships: 75 years of Southwest Power Pool,” by Nathania Sawyer with Les Dillahunty.

The book chronicles SPP from its birth on Dec. 16, 1941, when it was formed in support of the American war effort. Its main task was to keep power flowing to Jones Mill, an aluminum production facility near Malvern that was crucial to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s goal of producing 50,000 warplanes a year. Aluminum was the major material in plane-building, and Arkansas had the nation’s only major source of bauxite, the critical component in aluminum.

What the state didn’t have was enough electric energy. Jones Mill required 120 megawatts of power. At the time, all of Arkansas had a capacity of just 100 megawatts. SPP succeeded in pooling power to serve the plant, and after the war transitioned to providing reliable power to homes.

From its origins in the Pyramid Building at Second and Center streets, SPP was cool in crisis, keeping power flowing through destructive tornadoes and flooding in May 1943. If power to the plant had stopped, said Robert Welsh, a power pool engineer, “the processing pots at the vital plant would have frozen up, and it would have taken better than two months to put the back in operation.”

As power demands grew through the late 1940s and then soared exponentially as electric appliances, televisions and air conditioning flooded the American marketplace in the 1950s and 60s, SPP established and perfected wholesale electricity markets, helped in planning future generation and distribution and identified grid upgrades needed to keep power flowing.

A cascading power failure that left 30 million people on the East Coast in the dark in 1965 — and was initially seen as a possible Soviet attack — was quickly diagnosed as the result of a series of overloads. This underlined the importance of pooled power resources and reinforced the mission of SPP and other regional pools across the nation.

As the 60s turned into the 70s, concerns over the environment, the Arab oil embargo and nuclear power kept planners busy. A proposal to build 1,000 nuclear energy plants nationwide was crippled by the partial meltdown of a plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, and attention turned back to more conventional fuel sources afterward.

A summer heat crisis in 1980 strained the grid, leading to more changes, another Northeast blackout in 2003 demonstrated that outage emergencies were still possible in the modern era.

In the meantime, SPP moved its offices to the Plaza West Building on Cantrell Road, and then built a sparkling new 192,000-SF complex at 201 Worthen Drive. Its 600 employees all live in the central Arkansas area, according to Dustin B. Smith, SPP’s manager of government affairs and public relations.

The anniversary gave SPP a perfect opportunity to look forward as well as back, Brown said. Just as an air traffic controller doesn’t own planes or airports, SPP doesn’t own the generation facilities or transmission lines in its network. But its integrated marketplace provides about $500 million a year in savings to market participants, and a recent study showed that transmission investments had, on average, a benefit-to-cost ratio of 3.5 to 1. The average end-use customer using 1,000 kilowatt hours per month pays nearly $6 less simply because of SPP’s services, the organization says.

“Because of the strength of the relationships we’ve built, there is reason to be even more excited about our next 75 years,” Brown said.