2024 Mountain West Renewables Summit

In November, I had the opportunity to attend the 2024 Mountain West Renewables Summit in Salt Lake City. This event brings together leading energy decision-makers and executives from utilities, local governments, and load-serving entities (LSEs) to discuss the latest progress toward more formally organized western electricity markets in the eight-state Mountain West region. The summit focused on several key areas impacting renewable project development in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, and Wyoming.

Some of the key topics discussed are summarized below:

Regional Renewable Energy Outlook and Analysis

The summit opened with a panel discussion of the region’s energy outlook. Highlights from the panel were focused on the significant amount of load growth anticipated in the coming years with Artificial Intelligence (AI) driving the need for extensive data centers. Two main points were made in this panel session:

Large increases to load demand: AI will drive the need for more generation resources which will fuel new renewable resource projects; however, the anticipated reduction in tax credits will result in higher costs on the power purchase agreement (PPA) side for resource procurement.

Transmission Constraints: Access to transmission will continue to be an area of concern that will impact integration of both the large load associated with data centers’ need to support AI and the corresponding generation resources needed to serve this load.

The Utah Office of Energy Development Deputy Director stated that Utah will be focusing on geothermal and nuclear clean energy.

Evaluating the Advancement of Western Grid Integration and Regionalization Planning for Resource Adequacy, Seams, and Grid Reliability

A significant amount of time was dedicated to discussing planning activities in the eight-state region where significant seams issues currently exist. This point was discussed in two panel sessions, with one session covering the advancement of the western grid integration and regionalization activities and the other focused on the planning activities themselves. 

In the western grid integration panel, updates were presented which summarized the ongoing efforts to organize the western region into either an RTO or a day ahead market. Two day-ahead markets were discussed:

• Markets+ Market: Presented as a potential step towards becoming a full RTO or at a minimum incorporating substantial portions of the west into SPP.
• Extended Day-Ahead Market (EDAM): This market consists of the expanded CAISO market with commitment from PacifiCorp to join it.  

The presentation also discussed the Public Service Company of New Mexico’s (PNM) recently announced plan to join the CAISO EDAM. Arizona Public Service (APS) Salt River Project, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, Tucson Electric Power (TEP), and Xcel Energy's Public Service Co. of Colorado (PSCo) have also announced their plans to join the Southwest Power Pool's (SPP) Market+ initiative, thereby creating a market seams issue. 

The planning activity presentation focused on surrounding seams issues which have an impact on resource adequacy and grid reliability. The panel described a seams issue as a problem arising from neighboring entities performing the same function. In the absence of a full RTO, planning the transmission system, both for reliability and market, becomes complex. Each utility views electric needs with a different lens and the use of the collective transmission system are not permitted without entities providing the requisite transmission rights. The panelists indicated that establishment of a full RTO will be the best solution to seams issues. This will lead to improved reliability and greater access to transmission.

Easing Interconnection and Transmission Challenges in the Mountain West

As part of this panel session, the participants discussed the move from first-come first-served to a first-ready first-served paradigm associated with recent and pending FERC orders. Participants indicated that these improvements will not address significant barriers to development that involve cost and timeline certainty.

The panelists stated that land control should be a “low bar,” but stressed that developers will continue to be frustrated with the inability to interconnect projects due to extensive transmission constraints throughout the country, particularly in the west. The sentiment presented is that the change to a first-ready first-served will simply raise hurdles without addressing the underlying issue – lack of transmission. In summary, the panelists indicated that this change will be a failure when projects cannot be interconnected.