Southwest Power Pool to expand west of Rockies

LITTLE ROCK, ARK. — Southwest Power Pool officials said Monday the regional transmission organization will expand its power reliability coordination services west of the Rocky Mountains at the end of 2019.

Officials said those services, which include minute-by-minute power load balancing analyses and correctional recommendations, already are provided to utilities, municipal power systems and rural electricity distributors within the grid it operates across all or parts of 14 states stretching from Oklahoma to the U.S./Canadian border.

On Monday, Southwest Power Pool officials stated it has been selected to offer reliability services to more than a dozen entities operating within the Western Interconnection, a series of grids serving the United States west of the Continental Divide.

Power reliability services for those entities currently are provided at least in part by another firm planning to exit the business.

“We’ve worked hard over the last several months to demonstrate the quality and breadth of our service in terms of technical expertise, a customer-centric approach to doing business and the integrity of our people and processes,” Carl Monroe, the Southwest Power Pool's executive vice president and chief operating officer, stated in a release announcing the expansion. “We’re excited that so many entities in the west have seen value in our offerings.”