FERC rejects Southwest Power Pool resource adequacy proposal
FERC regulators point out that SPP’s market for bilateral capacity is relatively net-long compared to its proposed 12% planning reserve margin — so at least in the near term, there should be plenty of sellers to meet demand and the planning margin.
But the commission expressed concern over some of SPP’s proposal, including a proposal to post publicly which LREs have not met their resource adequacy requirement. That idea, the commission concluded, would be unreasonable and unduly discriminatory.
“SPP failed to provide justification for creating a new information asymmetry between deficient LREs and potential sellers of capacity,” the commission wrote. “As proposed, we are concerned that such information asymmetry may disadvantage LREs that are deficient, particularly if there is a limited quantity of available capacity.”
SPP has the results of a deliverability study, and some commenters on SPP’s proposed plan had requested the operator be required to release them as a means of resolving the issue. But FERC rejected that idea, noting that “those results contain proprietary information of the generator owners and should remain confidential.”
