As two separate regional power markets stretch their Western footprints from the Pacific Coast to Colorado, U.S. regulators on Thursday stepped in to ensure things run smoothly.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission directed the California Independent System Operator and Arkansas-based Southwest Power Pool to report on how they will coordinate when their systems intersect. By coordinating on transmission seams, FERC Chair Laura Swett said the two electricity market operators can head off the kind of cross-market inefficiencies that have dogged the patchwork power grid in the Eastern Interconnection.
Areas where markets touch, Swett said, have created transmission congestion and raised power prices in the East.
“Expansion of the CAISO and SPP service territories and markets could raise potentially even more issues of this kind because the West is characterized by such a wide diversity of market participation and transmission ownership arrangements,” Swett said at the commission’s meeting Thursday.
