FERC Conditionally Accepts Modifications To SPP Integrated Marketplace
On January 4, 2017, FERC issued an order conditionally accepting certain Open Access Transmission Tariff (“Tariff”) revisions submitted by the Southwest Power Pool, Inc. (“SPP”) in November 2016. The proposed Tariff revisions amend Attachment AE of the SPP Tariff, including the sections governing the Auction Revenue Right (“ARR”) Allocation and Transmission Congestion Right (“TCR”) Offer and Bid submittal processes in SPP’s Integrated Marketplace.
In its proposal, SPP sought to clarify the effect of Market Participant bids that impermissibly include Electronically Equivalent Settlement Locations (“EESL”) pairs in their ARR and TCR bids. SPP currently prohibits bidding between EESL pairs because such bids would otherwise essentially allow for near-infinite quantities of TCRs to be awarded at zero cost. Currently, SPP manually scrubs EESL bids from the TCR auction/allocation process; however, SPP is currently working to implement system enhancements that will automatically remove such bids from the TCR auction/allocation process. SPP’s Tariff, however, does not acknowledge that EESL-based ARR and TCR bids never make it into the relevant market analyses (regardless of whether they are removed manually or automatically). Thus, as SPP noted in its filing, the mere act of submitting such bids could be interpreted as a Tariff violation.
To remedy this confusion, SPP proposed several language revisions to the Tariff sections discussing ARRs and TCRs. One such change was to strike the term “electronically equivalent.” Another such change was to remove the term “collocated” from Attachment AE when referring to EESL pairs.
