SPP excited about serving new members

When Steve Johnson started work at SPP back in 2020, his assignment didn’t change much from his previous job at the Western Area Power Administration (WAPA). He was charged with helping move WAPA, along with a group of other western utilities, into an SPP market.  First the Western Energy Imbalance Service (WEIS) market, and ultimately the SPP regional transmission organization (RTO).

Steve Johnson, senior director of markets

“It’s a little surreal,” said Johnson, SPP senior director of markets administration. “I’m super excited. Let’s get this thing on.”

On April 1, SPP formally accepted more than 30 utilities serving loads in seven states – Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming – as participants in SPP’s service territory. The expansion effort was led by nine load-serving utilities with resources and customers in states in the West adjoining SPP’s prior service territory.

A previous effort that started over 10 years ago didn’t come to fruition. This time around SPP and a group of committed western utilities were able to find a successful path to establish the first interstate regional transmission organization operating in the western interconnection.

“There were many obstacles to overcome in establishing the first RTO operating in two interconnections with two balancing authority areas responding to a single market solution, but collectively we did it,” Johnson said.

Most of those leading members are major utilities or transmission owners in the area. The other 20 or so participants play a smaller, but no less important, role. Those include smaller municipal utilities and cooperatives that will reap the same market benefits as larger utilities.

Steve is a fifth-generation Californian that started his career in the power industry on a hydroelectric project near Yosemite. 

“My family moved to California in 1860 during the gold rush and we still own a house with a deed that goes back to 1862,” he said.

He moved to Colorado in 2000 to work for Western Area Power Administration and witnessed the California energy crisis first hand while managing the impacts to the Colorado/Wyoming transmission system.

As such, he’s vested personally in ensuring the success of SPP’s growth in the West and the benefits it will provide to western rate payers.

“Expansion will make a huge impact,” Johnson said.

How do utilities benefit from being part of SPP?

“Now, if you want to move energy across a system, you have a bunch of toll roads,” Johnson explained. “You may have three or four transmission charges. That’s what an RTO eliminates. In an RTO you pay a single rate that unlocks access to the entire system. It’s more economic.”

Furthermore, he noted that SPP operates a “five-minute dispatch” when currently utilities that are not participating in a market have a “one-hour dispatch” on their own.

What does this mean?

“If you predict your load will be 1,000 megawatts but then you get to real time and it’s 900 or your intermittent generation doesn’t show up like you expected you’ve got to manage that difference for an hour,” Johnson said. “Being part of SPP, you shorten that time to five minutes. It’s a much more robust economic and reliable approach.”