Excessive Heat Creates Impacts on the Grid and Southwest Power Pool
From Southwest Power Pool: The Southwest Power Pool (SPP) has extended the current Conservative Operations Advisory through 10 p.m. (CT) Wednesday, July 20. The advisory was originally scheduled to end at 10 p.m. today, Tuesday, July 19, but because of continued high loads and risks regarding the availability of generation resources, SPP has extended it for an additional 24 hours. SPP has indicated that a 1,200 megawatt (MW) nuclear unit tripped offline on Monday, which is also a key factor for the extension of the Conservative Operations Advisory. Hopes are that the unit will return to service on Thursday. SPP still has adequate generation available over their load and reserve commitments. Concurrent to the Conservative Operations Advisory, because of pervasive high temperatures, high region-wide electricity use, and uncertainty in its wind forecast, SPP also issued a Resource Advisory effective at 12 noon July 17 through 10 p.m. Thursday, July 21. The Resource and Conservative Operations Advisories do not require the public across SPP’s 14-state regional transmission organization (RTO) region to conserve energy. The following chart shows the relative severity of the Conservative Operations
Descriptions of common reliability events are provided below in increasing order of severity:
Advisories raise awareness and do not require general audiences to take action. SPP member utilities should follow applicable procedures. Energy Emergency Alerts indicate all available generation has been committed to meet region-wide demand. As conditions worsen, voluntary conservation or service interruptions may be necessary to prevent uncontrolled outages.
Normal Operations: SPP has enough generation to meet demand and available reserves, and it foresees no extreme or abnormal threats to reliability.
Weather Advisory: Declared when extreme weather is expected in SPP’s reliability coordination service territory.
Resource Advisory: Declared when severe weather conditions, significant outages, wind-forecast uncertainty and/or load-forecast uncertainty are expected in SPP’s balancing authority area.
Conservative Operations Advisory: Declared when SPP determines there is a need to operate its system conservatively based on weather, environmental, operational, terrorist, cyber or other events.
Energy Emergency Alert Level 1: Declared when all available resources have been committed to meet obligations, and SPP is at risk of not meeting required operating reserves.
Energy Emergency Alert Level 2: Declared when SPP can no longer provide expected energy requirements, or when SPP foresees or has implemented procedures up to, but excluding, service interruptions to maintain regional reliability.
Energy Emergency Alert Level 3: At this level, SPP is utilizing operating reserves such that it is carrying reserves below the required minimum and has initiated assistance through its Reserve Sharing Group. SPP foresees or has implemented firm load obligation interruption. Before requesting an EEA 3, SPP will have already provided the appropriate internal notifications to its Market Participants.
Restoration Event: Defined as a major or catastrophic grid outage which could be a total or partial regional blackout, island situation or system separation.