Integrating Southwest Power Pool Wind to Southeast Electricity ...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This DOE-funded project titled “Integrating Southwest Power Pool Wind Energy into Southeast
Electricity Markets” aims to evaluate the benefits of coordination of scheduling and balancing
for Southwest Power Pool (SPP) wind transfers to Southeastern Electric Reliability Council
(SERC) Balancing Authorities (BAs). The primary objective of this project is to analyze the
benefits of different balancing approaches with increasing levels of inter-regional cooperation.
Scenarios were defined, modeled and investigated to address production variability and
uncertainty and the associated balancing of large quantities of wind power in SPP and delivery to
energy markets in the western regions of SERC.
The study evaluates the scheduling/balancing challenges associated with delivery of sufficient
wind generation from within the SPP footprint to support 20% energy from renewable resources
across the SPP, Entergy (EES), Southern Company (SoCo), and the Tennessee Valley Authority
(TVA) balancing areas for the year 2022. The project team worked closely with staff from each
of these companies to develop a model of the possible generation fleets within each BA. Based
on the 2022 generation plans identified, specific wind generation sites within the SPP footprint
were identified to yield sufficient energy output to allow each of the 4 BAs to meet the net
renewable energy requirement beyond the renewable energy from the base generation fleet. As
the effort required for transmission planning for increased amounts of wind was outside the
scope of the project, transmission constraints were ignored and a transportation model was used.
The Eastern Interconnect wind generation data set developed by the National Renewable Energy
Laboratory (NREL) was utilized for identifying specific wind plants with SPP for both internal
SPP consumption and for delivery to the SERC BAs.
The primary analyses for the project include statistical analysis of wind and load data to
determine the impact on reserve requirements for each BA and unit commitment (UC) and
economic dispatch (ED) simulations of the SPP-SERC regions as modeled for the year 2022.
These evaluations are made for a 14 GW wind generation scenario where SPP wind generation is
intended for serving only SPP load and for 4 separate high wind (48 GW) transfer balancing
scenarios relative to the coordination between regions within the footprint:
1. Hourly Scheduling: SPP carries all additional within-hour reserves for the wind
generation for all SPP and SERC regions. Each BA schedules its own generation dayahead
to meet its own forecast load and reserve requirements based on forecast wind
generation from the SPP wind plants assigned to each BA without consideration of
generation in neighboring BAs. Note that a variation of the Hourly Scheduling
simulation (“Integration Proxy”) was conducted where all wind generation was assumed
to be perfectly forecast & no additional reserve was required for within-hour variability
of wind. This case was conducted as a hypothetical case to provide a measure of the
balancing costs associated with the wind generation by comparison to the Hourly
Scheduling base case.
2. Dynamic Scheduling: Each SERC BA and SPP individually carries reserves for its wind
generation output even though all wind is located in the SPP footprint. As with scenario
#1, each BA schedules its own generation day-ahead to meet its own load and reserve
requirements without consideration of generation from neighboring areas.
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