Although one of the aims of day-ahead markets in the West is to fix a fragmented transmission landscape, some islanded entities will have a tough time navigating seams issues likely to arise as markets take shape, analysts at Aurora Energy Research said during a webinar.
The Oregon Public Utility Commission approved wildfire mitigation plans proposed by the state’s three investor-owned utilities and supported staff recommendations the commission said the utilities should implement.
Portland General Electric told Oregon regulators that after decades of electricity flowing from north to south through its system during the summer, the flow on a typical summer day has reversed.
The Oregon Senate is set to vote on a bill that aims to mitigate the impact of rising energy costs on consumers by prohibiting residential rate increases during the winter and requiring utilities and regulators to analyze consumer affordability when setting rates.
The formation of two competing day-ahead markets will create seams across the West, but at least one utility representative is more worried about seams resulting from the fracture of CAISO’s real-time Western Energy Imbalance Market.
FERC rejected a request by four Western utilities to rehear its approval of the “transmission contributors” option in the SPP Markets+ tariff but provided the utilities clarification on the boundaries of that provision.
Though BPA removed any uncertainty by selecting SPP’s Markets+ over CAISO’s EDAM, the debate over whether BPA made the right choice likely will heat up as the West confronts a split into two major markets.
Following BPA’s pause on certain transmission planning processes, the agency’s customers say it might be time to consider creating a regional transmission organization or imposing stricter requirements to tackle the “exponential growth” of transmission service requests.
