SPP consolidated planning process to reduce costs and help meet nation’s growing energy needs

Years of collaboration among Southwest Power Pool (SPP) staff and stakeholders to accelerate and improve regional transmission planning culminated with the SPP Board of Directors’ recent approval of the Consolidated Planning Process (CPP).

The next step? SPP has filed the proposal with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission where it is under review.

CPP would leverage industry best practices, advanced technology and decades of expertise to provide a modern blueprint for keeping the regional grid reliable and affordable.

Sunny Raheem, Director of System Planning

“This is a monumental change that we should all be proud of,” said Sunny Raheem, director of system planning at SPP. “Until now, our study processes have reacted to requests for grid connection requests. With CPP, we’ll plan for growth proactively, anticipating requests and working ahead of them. This new approach will help our region advance into a modern era of grid connection and transmission planning, and it blazes the trail for the rest of the nation to follow.”

SPP anticipates the CPP will cut administrative costs by reducing the number of studies it has to perform and produce $6 million in savings every four years, plus more than $100 million in additional savings by avoiding duplication of major extra-high-voltage projects.

The move will enable SPP to better serve its members and their customers as the region prepares to meet tomorrow’s energy needs.

Currently, SPP handles generation interconnection (GI) requests and its annual Integrated Transmission Plan (ITP) separately. The streamlined CPP is a holistic approach to transmission planning that forecasts overall needs and takes all grid requirements into account. It will provide more certainty on costs, which is incredibly important to investors.

CPP approval follows significant improvements SPP has already made to accelerate the study of GI requests. An increasing amount of interconnection requests has led to lengthening of study times nationwide, including in the SPP region. SPP has already shortened its average study time to 18 months. Under the CPP, that time is anticipated to drop to seven months.

Several factors were essential to the development of an elegant but complex solution, including immense stakeholder participation, especially by members of the Consolidated Planning Process Task Force (CPPTF), and diligent collaboration among SPP’s diverse stakeholders and SPP staff, including a project team of more than 50 experts.

“This new grid-planning process is designed to be the most efficient in the nation and produce more equitable cost-sharing among those who benefit from transmission expansion,” said Andrew French, chair of the Kansas Corporation Commission and representing the SPP Regional State Committee on the CPP Task Force.

SPP is requesting the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approve a CPP effective date of March 1, 2026, with full implementation to begin in 2027. SPP’s first portfolio of projects to be studied and proposed under the CPP, as opposed to SPP’s legacy ITP process, will be delivered in 2028. Transitional work will bridge the gap between the ITP and CPP frameworks for the 2026 and 2027 ITP portfolios.