Years of collaboration among Southwest Power Pool (SPP) staff and stakeholders to accelerate and improve regional transmission planning culminated on Aug. 5 with the SPP Board of Directors’ approval of the Consolidated Planning Process, which SPP said is a "new approach that replaces legacy study methods, leveraging industry best practices, advanced technology and decades of expertise to provide a modern blueprint for keeping the regional grid reliable and affordable."
"The CPP represents a transformative shift in how SPP plans grid upgrades and expansion. It streamlines decision making, accelerates project delivery and ensures the most critical transmission needs are met with greater transparency, coordination and cost efficiency than ever before," the grid operator said.
SPP anticipates the CPP will cut administrative costs by reducing the number of studies it has to perform and produce $6 million in savings every four years, plus more than $100 million in additional savings by avoiding duplication of major extra-high-voltage projects.
The move will enable SPP to better serve its members and their customers as the region prepares to meet tomorrow’s energy needs, helping provide an adequate and reliable energy supply, it said.
Sunny Raheem, director of system planning at SPP, said, “Until now, our study processes have reacted to requests for grid connection requests. With CPP, we’ll plan for growth proactively, anticipating requests and working ahead of them. This new approach will help our region advance into a modern era of grid connection and transmission planning, and it blazes the trail for the rest of the nation to follow.”
Currently, SPP handles generation interconnection (GI) requests and its annual Integrated Transmission Plan (ITP) separately, resulting in separate cost allocation, missed opportunities and process redundancies.
"The CPP is a holistic approach to transmission planning that forecasts overall needs and takes all grid requirements into account. It will provide cost certainty to investors and a revamped funding structure to meet multiple needs," SPP said.
CPP approval follows significant improvements SPP has already made to accelerate the study of GI requests, it said.
A glut of interconnection requests over the previous decade led to lengthening of study times nationwide, including in the SPP region. SPP has already shortened its average study time to 18 months. Under the CPP, that time is anticipated to drop to seven months with a high degree of cost certainty for planned sites.
"Several factors were essential to the development of an elegant but complex solution, including immense stakeholder participation, especially by members of the Consolidated Planning Process Task Force (CPPTF), and diligent collaboration among SPP’s diverse stakeholders," SPP said.
SPP staff, including a project team of more than 50 experts, worked on the effort with numerous representatives of SPP’s stakeholder organizations for three years, "ultimately producing an innovative solution that many industry experts considered unachievable at the effort’s start."
The board’s approval of the CPP follows unanimous approval by SPP’s Markets and Operations Policy Committee, Regional State Committee and numerous other working groups.
“This is a tremendous effort by SPP staff and stakeholders,” Jennifer Solomon, executive director of regulatory affairs at NextEra Energy, said during the July MOPC meeting. “The team should be proud of getting to this point but also of how it got to this point. This was a true collaboration with subject matter experts from a diverse array of sectors and companies. Folks really tried to put aside individual interests to come to the best solution. It’s really SPP at its best when that happens.”
“This new grid-planning process is designed to be the most efficient in the nation and produce more equitable cost-sharing among those who benefit from transmission expansion. CPP was crafted over several years with input from SPP’s diverse stakeholder community – including extensive involvement from state regulators. Ultimately, the benefits of more holistic, efficient, and equitable transmission planning will flow to all retail electricity customers in the RTO footprint,” said Andrew French, chair of the Kansas Corporation Commission and representing the SPP Regional State Committee on the CPP Task Force.
SPP is asking the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to approve a CPP effective date of March 1, 2026, with full implementation to begin in 2027.
SPP’s first portfolio of projects to be studied and proposed under the CPP, as opposed to SPP’s legacy ITP process, will be delivered in 2028.
Transitional work will bridge the gap between the ITP and CPP frameworks for the 2026 and 2027 ITP portfolios.
The 2024 ITP was the most extensive portfolio in SPP’s history, with 89 projects encompassing more than 2,300 miles of transmission lines, boasting an 8-to-1 benefit-to-cost ratio, SPP said.
The 2025 ITP will be presented to SPP’s members and board for approval in November and is expected to include a similarly expansive, valuable portfolio of grid improvements, the grid operator said.
