Case studies on integrating renewable resources.
Seth Parker is a principal and vice president of the energy consulting firm, Levitan & Associates Inc. (LAI). Jack Elder is LAI’s manager of power systems and market design, and Boris Shapiro is an executive consultant with the firm.
Transmission issues of need and siting have been around for decades. More recently, the push to integrate renewable resources has raised new transmission issues of planning, risk allocation, and funding responsibility. Many regional transmission organizations (RTOs) and other transmission entities have been wrestling with these new issues, and now FERC has weighed in with Order 1000 that provides transmission planning and cost allocation guidelines while preserving the RTO stakeholder processes.
FERC issued its final rule in Order 1000 on July 21, 2011. Order 1000 applies Order 890’s planning principles—coordination, openness, transparency, information exchange, comparability, dispute resolution, regional coordination, economic planning, and cost allocation—to regional transmission planning. Order 1000 also requires RTOs and other entities to cooperate on transmission planning and cost allocation matters, and requires regions to adopt a form of “beneficiaries pay” cost allocation to ensure that transmission costs are allocated to beneficiaries, commensurate with estimated benefits.