The Truckee Donner Public Utility District has asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to resolve an Order 888 transmission dispute with Sierra Pacific Power Co.
Truckee buys most of its power from SPP but wants the freedom to shop around for less expensive electricity from other suppliers. Truckee is located high on the Eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, within SPP's service territory and is not connected with any other utility. It asked SPP to grant it network transmission service up to the amount of 30 megawatts (its peak load), including the use of up to 30 MW of SPP's total interface capacity.
But SPP has notified Truckee that, pursuant to its open-access transmission tariff, a customer's use of interface capacity cannot exceed the customer's load-ratio share. Based on Truckee's contributions to system peak for the 12 months ended September 1996, its current load ratio share is 1.47 percent. This means that only 5 MW of capacity is available for Truckee's use in integrating its network resources outside of SPP's control area with its network load. All other network resources must be inside SPP's control area.