SPP working hard to meet demand of AI, large loads

As the energy industry faces the daunting task of connecting and serving high-demand AI data centers and other large loads, grid operators must balance essential goals of reliability, affordability, and speed.

SPP is responding. The board of directors asked staff to develop a plan to smartly and efficiently study and approve requests to connect large loads to the SPP electric grid.

Antoine Lucas, Chief Operating Officer

“Most people when they hear large loads, the first thing they think of is data centers,” said Antoine Lucas, chief operating officer at SPP. “But in our footprint, we have lots of large loads associated with oil and gas exploration. Many of these operations are looking to electrify, going away from large diesel generators.”

Lucas emphasized that it’s not SPP’s role to make a judgment on whether data centers and other large loads are good or bad.

“States are trying to boost their economies,” he said. “What we do is say, let’s hear about what your goals are, and we’ll develop the regional processes to make that happen in a manner that is reliable and affordable and timely.”

The result? A proposed framework to integrate High Impact Large Loads (HILLs) that includes transmission service, generation interconnection, delivery point and other pertinent reliability studies into a single framework that enables timely, informed decision-making and action.

Casey Cathey, Vice President of Engineering

“We need realistic and reasonable study results and not take two years to do them,” said Casey Cathey, SPP vice president for engineering. “We’ve targeted a 90-day connection study. Our objective is to have the fastest connection among RTOs in the country.”

Some of the proposed HILLs would exceed the demand for some cities in the SPP footprint.

“No one would have thought this was real a few years ago,” Cathey said.

SPP officials say they’re committed to ensuring the grid remains reliable and the system’s integrity remains intact should these loads be connected.

HILLs was approved by the SPP board in September and has been submitted to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for review and approval.  Also filed at FERC was the HILLGA (High Impact Large Load Generation Addition) proposal which envisions ways to add supporting generation if the local utility doesn’t have enough excess power to support a large load.

“I’m very pleased we’ve adopted a policy that addresses an urgent need and opportunity in the SPP region,” said board member Stuart Solomon. “This is a great example of our stakeholder process at its best, and I’m confident we now have an excellent approach to meeting the needs of our members and large-load customers looking to locate in the SPP region.”

In the coming months, two more prongs of SPP’s large load plan will be considered by the board. Conditional High Impact Large Loads (CHILLs) would connect large loads to the grid more quickly as long as certain reliability benchmarks are maintained. PAL (Price Adaptive Loads) would allow flexible grid usage depending on price and market signals.