News
LCG, May 8, 2025--The Southwest Power Pool (SPP) Board of Directors approved SPP’s proposed Expedited Resource Adequacy Study (ERAS) at its May 6 meeting. SPP developed the new ERAS in collaboration with its stakeholders in response to the growing need to add new generating resources before the region’s generating capacity is outpaced by its electricity demands. ERAS is intended to be a one-time, expedited study process designed to significantly accelerate the addition of new power generation facilities to the grid and address concerns about the near term ability to maintain the affordable and reliable electric service that consumers expect.
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LCG, May 7, 2025--EDP Renewables North America LLC (EDPR NA) announced yesterday the inauguration of its Scarlet II Solar Energy Park (Scarlet II) in Fresno County, California. This phase of the solar plus energy storage project includes 200 MW of solar capacity, plus a co-located 150 MW/600 MWh battery energy storage system (BESS). The initial phase of the project, Scarlet I, which provides 200 MW of solar and 40 MW/160 MWh of BESS, achieved commercial operations in July 2024.
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Industry News
Southwest Power Pool Sets Wind Penetration Record of 52.1 Percent
LCG, February 15, 2017--Southwest Power Pool (SPP) announced earlier this week that it achieved a wind-penetration record of 52.1 percent at 4:30 a.m., February 12, when it became the first regional transmission organization (RTO) in North America to serve over 50 percent of its electric demand at a given time with wind energy. SPP set the previous RTO record of 49.2 percent on April 24, 2016.
The installed wind farm capacity and wind power generation in the SPP region has grown dramatically. Since the turn of the century, SPP's installed wind capacity has grown from a few hundred MW's to becoming the third most-prevalent fuel source in the SPP region. Wind capacity provided approximately 15 percent of SPP's generating capacity in 2016, exceeded only by natural gas and coal. Installed wind capacity increased in 2016 by 4,000 MW - from 12,000 MW to over 16,000 MW, and SPP's maximum simultaneous wind generation peak rose from 9,948 MW in 2015 to 12,336 MW in early 2016.
In concert with the installation of new wind farms, SPP has approved the construction of over 10 billion dollars in high-voltage transmission infrastructure over the last decade, with much of the construction designed to connect rural, isolated Midwestern wind farms to population centers hundreds of miles away.
SPP's Vice President of Operations stated, "Ten years ago, we thought hitting even a 25 percent wind-penetration level would be extremely challenging, and any more than that would pose serious threats to reliability. Since then, we've gained experience and implemented new policies and procedures. Now we have the ability to reliably manage greater than 50 percent wind penetration. It's not even our ceiling. We continue to study even higher levels of renewable, variable generation as part of our plans to maintain a reliable and economic grid of the future."
SPP's President and CEO said, "It's exciting to see the evolution of our efforts to maintain a reliable power grid. It allows for very different generation patterns than we've historically experienced. But for new day-ahead unit commitment procedures and market processes for managing congestion across a single balancing authority in fourteen states, these new records would not be possible."
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UPLAN-NPM
The Locational Marginal Price Model (LMP) Network Power Model
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UPLAN-ACE
Day Ahead and Real Time Market Simulation
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UPLAN-G
The Gas Procurement and Competitive Analysis System
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PLATO
Database of Plants, Loads, Assets, Transmission...
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