OREANDA-NEWS. Members of a Southwest Power Pool (SPP) task force want to incorporate more information from daily operations into the grid operator's near- and long-term transmission planning process so that the effort better addresses real-time grid problems.

Directors approved \$474mn in grid upgrades in January, completing two cycles of SPP's integrated transmission planning process which includes near-term, 10-year and 20-year transmission planning horizons.

Creation of a transmission planning improvement task force was prompted, in part, by an inability of the transmission planning process to solve some well-known congestion in the region.

"The criteria limits some things we can do," a task force member said at the first meeting last week. "How can we look at things happening in real-time that may not meet the criteria and get them into the planning process?"

NextEra Energy Transmission executive director of development Brian Gedrich was named chairman of the 11-member task force, which consolidated more than a dozen proposed goals into three areas.

Task force members want to find ways to include modeling practices used in generation interconnection studies, as well as other transmission studies, to identify gaps between the various planning processes.

The group wants to recommend ways to utilize operations data to benchmark real-time and planning horizon assessments to ensure consistency in the planning process.

A third area will be to evaluate the appropriateness of SPP's current near-term, 10-year and 20-year planning cycle and assessments, the need to include production cost modeling in more assessments and to evaluate the weighting of scenarios and sensitivities in the process.

This review will look at metrics used to evaluate proposed grid projects, including ratepayer impact metrics and planning the transmission system beyond first contingency criteria in accordance with a new standard from the North American Electric Reliability Corp.

The SPP task force is expected to consider eliminating the 20-year planning cycle or doing it less frequently since most projects do not advance to construction.

The task force will serve as a "check and adjust" tool for the integrated transmission planning process, which was developed in response to Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Order 890 in 2005 that required open, transparent and coordinated transmission planning to meet regional needs, SPP director of transmission planning Antoine Lucas said.

Separately, SPP's regional allocation review task force is tackling the thorny issue of cost allocation for transmission projects, specifically when remedies are required to better balance a utility's share of costs to its benefits.