Adequate electricity for the Northwest: a technical and policy problem

The North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) supports federal legislation to make enforceable its minimum operating reserve guidelines that are necessary for a reliable transmission system. This is an improvement over the void that we now operate under, but does not address the larger and more significant need for adequate capacity reserves. A minimum operating reserve that supports a transmission system on an hour-by-hour basis is essential. But operating reserves of 5 to 7 percent are not sufficient to prevent the frequent problems that we have seen recently in wholesale markets. It is now widely recognized that there is a need for voluntary adequacy standards in the NW. These standards are likely to look different from those of other regions because of the unique characteristics of the NW power system. The Northwest relies heavily on hydropower for electricity generation which means that we experience sizable year-to-year variation in energy and that we are more likely to be energy-constrained than capacity-constrained. These unique issues have been addressed in the past by "critical water" calculations but proposals for the future are likely to be different. These include variations of "critical water" and loss of load probabilities. Finally the region will have to overcome the political challenge of implementing an adequacy standard. There is at this time no obvious way to introduce a single adequacy standard to cover both private and public utilities in a four-state region.