SPP and its member organizations propose historic investment in transmission upgrades
On Oct. 15, SPP’s stakeholders voted in support of the single largest portfolio of transmission investments in the organization’s history. SPP’s Integrated Transmission Planning (ITP) process yielded recommendations for $7.7 billion in transmission projects that studies show will pay for themselves in a matter of years, return benefits at a rate of at least eight-to-one and address reliability needs across SPP’s service territory resulting from load growth, changes in the region’s generating fleet, resiliency from increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events and more.
The 2024 ITP portfolio is the product of 27 months of study and approximately 150 meetings of 11 working groups and committees comprising representatives of SPP’s member organizations. SPP staff evaluated more than 2,000 potential solutions to reliability and economic system needs, eventually arriving at 89 projects that represent 2,277 miles of new transmission and 443 miles of transmission rebuilds. The project portfolio has the highest benefit-to-cost ratio – 8:1 or better – of any ITP portfolio SPP has proposed.
SPP’s Markets and Operations Policy Committee – a group comprising representatives of every member of the SPP regional transmission organization (RTO) – voted in approval of the recommended portfolio, which will next be presented to SPP’s board of directors for final approval on Oct. 29.
As part of its annual ITP process, SPP continually studies the bulk power grid to identify transmission enhancements needed to mitigate threats to reliability, public policy, economic analysis like cost effective wholesale power delivery and levelize wholesale power costs across its territory, among other system needs. Since it became the planning authority and RTO for its region in 2004, SPP has directed the construction of more than $12 billion in transmission projects. Studies have shown projects constructed in the SPP region provide net benefits at a rate of 5-to-1 or better when compared to engineering and construction costs.
Transmission investments directed by SPP until now have facilitated the lowering and levelizing of wholesale electricity costs across the RTO’s region, the reliable integration of massive amounts of renewable energy and the continued electrification of the central U.S. This buildout and reinforcement of the region’s transmission system brought the region to the point that it now needs significant investment to enable continued load growth associated with oil and gas production, mining and placement of data centers in the SPP region; ensure long-term reliability and address the impacts of the retirement of conventional generators that use coal and natural gas as fuel sources.