Southwest Power Pool, the electric grid and wholesale energy market manager that has its Southern headquarters in Little Rock, has reached agreements to be the grid reliability coordinator for 13 power entities in the Western U.S.
The deals are with Arizona Electric Power Cooperative, Black Hills Power Inc., Cheyenne Light, Fuel & Power Co., Black Hills Colorado Electric, Colorado Springs Utilities, El Paso Electric Co., the Intermountain Rural Electric Association, Platte River Power Authority, Public Service Company of Colorado, Tri-State Generation & Transmission Association, Tucson Electric Power, the Western Area Power Administration and the city of Farmington, New Mexico.
“We’ve worked hard over the last several months to demonstrate the quality and breadth of our service in terms of technical expertise, a customer-centric approach to doing business and the integrity of our people and processes,” Carl Monroe, SPP’s executive vice president and COO, said in a statement. “We’re excited that so many entities in the West have seen value in our offerings.”
SPP, a nonprofit corporation which as a regional transmission organization has served the Eastern Interconnection as a reliability coordinator for more than 20 years, only recently received authorization to offer that service in the West. The organization coordinates the flow of electricity across 66,000 miles of high-voltage lines in 14 states and one Canadian province.
“In short, reliability coordinators are air-traffic controllers for the power grid,” SPP spokesman Derek Wingfield explained to Arkansas Business. Their main responsibility is to keep the lights on by overseeing interconnected grid operations at a regional wholesale level and ensuring reliable electricity to customers. “To do so we work with the operators of transmission and generation facilities to maintain a wide-area view of the grid’s current state and likely future conditions and plan for and manage contingencies in real time.”
SPP is one of 13 reliability coordinators in the Eastern Connection. Their task, according to North American Reliability Corp. standards, is to “preserve the reliability benefits of interconnected operations and coordinate such that none may adversely affect another’s area of jurisdiction.”
Through expanding its reliability coordinating services, SPP “aims to leverage its experience and systems to provide reliability and cost savings to Western utilities while lowering costs for its existing members,” SPP said in a news release. The newly contracted reliability services will be “ready to go live,” the company said, in December 2019.
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