Western Interconnection

They often, you know, have very long development cycles, have struggle kind of getting over the financing and construction hurdles.

And so what we've set out to do at Grid United, in particular with our North Plains Connector project, a 420-mile, 3,000-megawatt line connecting SPP, MISO, and the Western Interconnection.

Obviously, very ambitious project.

And we've looked to, okay, what are the kind of main things that are inhibiting these types of projects from moving forward.

I know you put out your blog on just the wider trends of interchange out west.

You want to touch on that and then touch on what you're looking at ahead for this week if it's maybe going to be a little bit quieter out west?

Yeah, it is going to be a quieter week out West, you know, outside of, you know, some storms that are forecast.

But yeah, the Western interchange is kind of hot topics.

Both Kaizo and SPP are holding these or have held these joint seams meetings for the past couple of months, kind of talking about how their markets are interacting now that, you know, SPP West is into play, EDM's into play, Markets Plus is coming into play.

And this is subsequently changing, you know, how flows are scheduled, how flows might shift and change.

What was historically used to be what happened might not be able to happen much longer given how markets are shifting and changing.

And we cover that in the blog.

Total project value sums to $5,252 million, The four cross-regional awards to Colorado, Oklahoma, Ohio, and Indiana take 43% of the federal dollars.

DOE describes one of them, the three-corners connector between the Southwest Power Pool and the Western Interconnection, as a new high-capacity transmission link which places it outside the reconductoring work.

Which technologies appear in the 31 project descriptions? Line rating technology appears in more project descriptions than any other single technology.

11 of the 31 descriptions name dynamic line rating or a line rating or capacity rating system.

Exactly.

The Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection, and the Texas Interconnection are physically out of phase with one another.

You're kidding.

No.

A balancing authority, for those of you who are wondering what does it mean, it's an operational organization of an electric grid, so in this case, TID's 662 square miles of our service territory, that constantly matches the electricity generation with consumer demand.

So we're always having to balance load and demand to help make sure that the Western Interconnection is stable.

Okay, and that's, that's strictly on us.

We are a one agency balancing authority, which I think is kind of unusual, but really what that means is it's, it's on us to match, like you said, supply with demand 24/7 around the clock.

We match our supply and demand, as we've already stated.

We have to control frequency.

That frequency connects us to the rest of the interconnection, and so to make sure that power flows throughout the entire Western Interconnection are stable, we have to maintain a 60 hertz frequency.

It also means that we manage transfers, so that's the buying and selling of power across high voltage system with other neighboring balancing authorities.