The proposed merger between Black Hills Corp. and NorthWestern Energy likely will reshape the map in the competition between CAISO’s Extended Day-Ahead Market and SPP’s Markets+ — but it’s still too early to know where new boundaries will be drawn.

Responding to an appellate court’s concerns about free ridership, FERC reversed a decision that allowed the WestConnect transmission planning region to include a category of participants not subject to binding cost allocation.

Stakeholder comments filed with the West-Wide Governance Pathways Initiative illustrate the complexity of building the new kind of Western regional organization envisioned by backers of the effort.