Southwest Power Pool Expands Service Territory into the Western Interconnection of the Nation’s Power Grid

Southwest Power Pool (SPP) has expanded its service territory into the Western Interconnection of the nation’s power grid.

SPP now has services covering two interconnections, helping member organizations to gain benefits from an operationally and geographically diverse integrated system. After testing, simulation, and joint operational coordination with many participating utilities, SPP’s expanded RTO operations officially started on April 1.

Nine load-serving utilities led the expansion, which will extend SPP’s service territory to include resources and customers of numerous utilities in seven states – Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. As RTO members and participants in SPP’s wholesale market, they will have access to the RTO’s portfolio of generating resources, innovative planning services, and support in coordinating electric reliability

Participation in SPP’s RTO is expected to deliver enhanced reliability, lower wholesale energy costs through regional dispatch, transparent and independent grid governance, and efficient planning that supports economic growth.

Operating as a coordinated system will strengthen real‑time situational awareness across a wider geography and enable the region to maximize diverse generating resources, navigate weather events and other threats to grid integrity, and optimize the use and planning of the region’s transmission network. The benefits will grow as new members will join into SPP’s planning processes, markets, and reliability toolset.

SPP is also developing a separate wholesale market called Markets+ to enable western utilities, not RTO members, earn the benefits of a day-ahead market and other services. Currently, SPP serves a 732,000 square-mile region comprising all or part of 17 states and that is home to 20 million people.