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Discover how Tri-State and our members are embracing the opportunity to power the West in our new podcast, Western Watts!
We'll dive into the heart of energy issues, from reliability to wildfire mitigation, and share firsthand insights relevant to rural, agricultural and mountain communities across Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico and Wyoming.
This podcast may contain certain forward looking statements concerning Tri-State's plans, performance, and strategies. Actual results may differ materially because of numerous factors, and Tri-State undertakes no obligation to update these forward looking statements. We urge you to review Tri-State's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a discussion of these factors.
Duane Highley:The whole thing with RTOs is there's network effects. The bigger it is and the more participants, the greater the benefits get. And it's not just linear. It grows geometrically as you add more participants. We wanna see this get as big as possible.
Elizabeth Schilling:Thank you for joining us for Western Watts. I'm Elizabeth Schilling.
Julia Eshleman:I'm Julia Eschelman. And today, we're gonna
Elizabeth Schilling:be talking about regional transmission organizations or RTOs. For those not familiar, they're electric utility service providers that band together to help make the grid more efficient. For example, Southwest Power Pool is an RTO in 14 Central US states with over a 100 members and growing. On April 1, Tri-State is making the move to join the Southwest Power Pool RTO Western expansion. This is a major move for Tri-State, SPP, and utilities in the Rocky Mountain Region. Tri-State and our members will benefit from greater efficiency and lower cost energy, while SPP will expand into the Western grid. We're currently members of SPP on the Eastern Interconnection, but on April 1, large portions of our Colorado and Wyoming service area will join SPP in the Western Interconnection. Here with us, we have Duane Heile, Tri-State's CEO, to dive deeper into what this means for us going forward. Duane, thanks for joining us.
Duane Highley:Glad to be here.
Elizabeth Schilling:We're gonna talk about RTOs today. Just start with Uh-huh. Can we define what RTO stands for?
Duane Highley:Yeah. So an RTO is a regional transmission organization. Sometimes they're also called ISOs, which is independent system operator. In the case of California, the RTO is called an ISO, California ISO, California Independent System Operator, but takes what would have been individual people doing their own thing and coordinates it across a broader area, multiple utilities. But it also brings together a power market, so you no longer have to do bilateral transactions, which is literally me calling you and saying, do you have surpluses next hour?
Duane Highley:What's your price? Well, I got surplus at this price. Maybe we should do a deal, or maybe I should back down my generator and you'll increase yours. That's a pretty cumbersome way to optimize if I have to call all my neighbors on the telephone and literally say, how do I transfer power? Instead, I could bid it in and everybody would have full price transparency and a centralized entity could say, here's the most efficient way and the most cost effective way to meet the load.
Duane Highley:Also, most reliable way. All that's taken into account to find a complete optimum answer for everybody.
Julia Eshleman:Just for listeners to give them an idea, North America is chunked out in these big RTO groups, and I think there are
Duane Highley:About seven or so big RTOs. ISO New England, which is New England states, as you might guess. PJM, which stands for Pennsylvania. New Jersey, Maryland. MISA, which is a bunch of central states like Illinois, North and south.
Duane Highley:SPP, which is about 14 states, north and south. Again, like Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, etcetera, and now moving west. And then California, independent system operator all the way up in California and a little bit of Nevada. Well, there's not really any RTL presence in that gap of the big part of the West between. And Missouri itself has a little bit of a gap that yet to be filled.
Duane Highley:And then some parts of the Southeastern United States are still not an RTO.
Julia Eshleman:Do the RTOs play nice together?
Duane Highley:Oh, that's a great question. The answer is mostly yes. They did work out what we call seams agreements to work out. What are the rules gonna be for moving power across the seam? It's in everybody's interest for that to work efficiently, and in most places, it does.
Duane Highley:There can be issues around the seams. I'll say, by and large, the fears of seams are grossly exaggerated, and there's really not the kind of problems that people talk about. There's already seams all over the place. We've got bigger problems right now with having multiple balancing areas where we can't move power across broad regions. Where you got two professional players that are gonna work together to figure out what those rules need to be and everybody gets a voice.
Duane Highley:That doesn't seem to me like a big problem that you should be avoiding.
Elizabeth Schilling:Why should somebody who just wants their lights to stay on care about what an RTO is?
Duane Highley:Why should you care? Of course, our objective is always that you wouldn't know anything about what's going on behind the switch. People do take it for granted, but I'm glad they do because that means we're doing our job. While an RTO might seem like something you really don't need to know about or want to know about, the reason is it makes things better. It makes things more reliable and more affordable.
Duane Highley:That's the big picture. And it does that by bringing together a broader area, more utilities under one umbrella, and better coordinating energy, better coordinating transmission planning. It's a good thing, and I hope people see it as that.
Julia Eshleman:Can you dumb it down even more? Like, you have a bunch of utilities. They don't all talk to each other, and this helps them talk to each other.
Duane Highley:Yeah. I mean, it's more like what air traffic controllers do for the air traffic system. A lot of independent people who own airplanes, they all wanna get places. They wanna do it without bumping into each other. If there weren't air traffic controllers, it would be pretty hard to coordinate all that.
Duane Highley:In the beginning, there weren't. Right? It used to just be people with airplanes, and then they got more and more sophisticated over time at how they coordinate. So in a similar way, the grid has grown up from individual cities, each having their own power supply, not even being interconnected to one another. And then throughout the forties and fifties, we started interconnecting North America.
Duane Highley:In the sixties, those interconnections became pretty broad and regional, and issues started occurring. The great New York blackout in the sixties. And because things weren't well coordinated, that was really the impetus to increase the pace of improvement for RTOs.
Julia Eshleman:So it's been a long time coming.
Duane Highley:It has been, and it just keeps getting better in terms of the overall coordination and benefit of it.
Julia Eshleman:So Tri-State isn't doing something novel by wanting to join an RTO?
Duane Highley:No. In fact, we're kind of the laggards, to be real honest, in The United States. There's the Eastern grid East of Kansas, Colorado border, you wanna think of it that way. And there's the Western grid, is everything West, but then there's Texas, which is independent. But I worked most of my career in the Eastern grid, and everything was really tightly coordinated over there.
Duane Highley:There were RTOs in existence broadly across that entire region, multiple RTOs that had been in existence for decades. And then you come into the West, and when I came in 2019 even, other than California, we still didn't have really a very well functioning RTO. But here we are with the opportunity to bring SPP West, which is gonna be a good thing.
Julia Eshleman:But do we wanna back up a little bit and just say, okay. RTO. Cool. I understand coordinating everything. But what are the actual hard tangible benefits of an RTO?
Duane Highley:I think it's 230,000,000 a year that the Colorado PUC estimated would be benefits to utilities as a result of having an RTO. Just the limited RTO that we're talking about right now, not to mention if it expands across the West. The benefits come in the form of cheaper energy because you're able to get to lower cost energy supplies from other power plants across the region that you might not have been able to call on the phone and just say, next hour, do you have energy? And doing
Julia Eshleman:that cold and you couldn't
Duane Highley:get through. Yeah. And it's also every five minutes instead of every hour. So you're further optimizing. So first of all, cheaper energy.
Duane Highley:Second of all, you don't get to play in the RTO and not cover your resources with reserves. Currently, people in the West that are doing that, they're buying and selling energy, but they're not covering that with any reserve capacity, and that is just not right. If you get into an RTO, you're actually gonna have to comply with the resource adequacy construct, which makes it more reliable for everybody, which means fewer outages and outages cost money and cost lives sometimes. So there's the reliability aspect. There's the centralized planning for transmission.
Duane Highley:So instead of me just building my line and you building your line and sometimes those kind of duplicate each other, If there was somebody centrally coordinating all that, they go, maybe you guys should have just built one line, and it would have solved both your problems. It's all those things, all those benefits that come together.
Julia Eshleman:When they say, oh, it's a billion dollars in cost benefits, like, is that just lower power prices? What is the cost benefits part?
Duane Highley:A large part of it is power costs from the organized market and having that day ahead look at the market. So that's probably the majority of the benefits. Then there's a big block of benefits from not duplicating transmission. So I'm gonna build a single plan line instead of multiple utilities building their own line. Then there's the benefits they assess from the fact that there's greater reliability and the lights don't go out, and there's a cost to having the lights go out for people when they can't run their business or what have you.
Julia Eshleman:Which I didn't realize. I was reading something that was saying power outages cost America, like, a $150,000,000,000 a year or something insane like that. I didn't realize that it cost money. I didn't realize that there was an associated cost to, like, outages
Duane Highley:Oh, it's horrible.
Julia Eshleman:That way. In my mind, it's a big deal to hand over the keys. What are the guardrails to make sure that's okay?
Duane Highley:You know, one of the great things about an RTO is it's nonprofit. One of the great things about Southwest Power Pool as an RTO is that even to a greater extent than other RTOs, it has member input. In fact, like Tri-State, people sometimes say we're painfully collaborative. Well, in SPP, every utility has a voice, and every state regulatory commission has a voice. So you can imagine going to an SPP board meeting there.
Duane Highley:You might have 200 people in the room for a board meeting and multiple committees so that everything has exhaustive customer member input. On a nonprofit basis, it's all very open and transparent. It's not just SPP saying, we're gonna build this and you're gonna pay for it. But they're like, we're gonna build this. We think this is how you should pay for it.
Duane Highley:But then the states get to say, actually, we think it should work differently, which is unique for SPP, and they can have input into how that gets paid for.
Julia Eshleman:Geographically speaking, we had two options because we're kinda just splitting the country in half with which RTO makes the most sense to join. There was California, Cal ISO, and there's also SPP. We must have chosen. We must have picked SPP for a reason. Yep.
Julia Eshleman:What goals did they have that align with Tri-State's goals?
Duane Highley:First is the governance. While they both operate power markets, they both do centralized transmission planning, they both offer a resource adequacy construct. In the case of California, up until now, been people appointed by the governor of the state of California. You would have been depending on the judgment of somebody who's got California interest first. Now they have made a change to allow independent directors for the parts of the RTO that go outside of California.
Duane Highley:It is an improvement. However, they still don't have this construct of what we call the regional state committee, which is part of SPP, which is where each state regulatory commission has a seat at the table and gets to determine cost allocation. That doesn't happen even under the new proposal with Cal ISO.
Julia Eshleman:So SPP is gonna give Tri-State a more holistic and a more democratic process going forward, which is great because our footprint is so diverse.
Duane Highley:Yes. And there's another significant benefit for Tri State, which is just geographic proximity. And the load that we have on the Eastern Interconnect is currently served and coordinated through Southwest Power Pool's RTO now. We're a member already. We're familiar with them.
Duane Highley:But also, as they expand west and we have all of our load on both sides or a greater proportion anyway served under that model, it's better for us. Whole thing with RTOs is there's network effects. The bigger it is and the more participants, the greater the benefits get. And it's not just linear, it grows geometrically as you add more participants. We wanna see this get as big as possible.
Duane Highley:In the case of SPP, this is a trade off. We're working now for regional benefits, not just for my best benefits, but for the best benefits for the entire region, multiple states that are served here. It means fewer outages. Storm Uri itself would not have occurred had there been another thousand megawatts of transfer capability across the two grids. That was a study that was done post storm Uri.
Duane Highley:So those rolling blackouts would not have been necessary.
Julia Eshleman:That's wild.
Duane Highley:You join a G and T because you want that long term risk aversion. It may not always be the lowest cost every year, but over the long term, is because you've got your resources covered. You're in an ownership position. That's the benefits of a G and T. The benefits of an RTO is you're gonna have somebody coordinating these things over the long term, looking out far in advance and making sure that the resources are covered and making sure that there's adequate transmission to take away any congestion.
Duane Highley:And where there is congestion, finding the most optimal dispatch to get around it so that where's that next increment of power need to come from?
Julia Eshleman:And it's a way for coops to get the benefits of the economics of scale without having to build all those resources. I was reading something earlier. It was the national transmission needs study says, apparently, we're gonna need a 57% increase in transmission by 2030.
Duane Highley:Yeah. So, yeah, that'd be a desire.
Julia Eshleman:I guess step one is making the assets that are already built more efficient. You know?
Duane Highley:Exactly. And by coordinating dispatch across a broader region, you do make those assets more efficient. Also, if you talk about building lots of transmission scale, how do we do this in a smart way? We do it in a smart way by making sure we're coordinating across many states at once and looking at the whole region. That's where you get the regional transmission construct beneficial.
Julia Eshleman:Is the board excited to join in the RTO?
Duane Highley:The board is excited and same time nervous because we're not in it yet, and they have this concern about what will be the unintended consequence. Everything you do that's a change probably brings benefits and sometimes brings disadvantages. We have a lot of confidence on the part of staff that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, but I'll just say, for example, when you join an RTO, the RTO will build transmission, and that means the cost of transmission will go up. And that's fearful for some people. They say, oh my gosh.
Duane Highley:If you get into RTO, your transmission costs are gonna go up, and that is an absolute certainty because what do they do? They study the grid and say, there needs to be more lines here or there, and they would be an advantage if you built them from both a reliability and a cost perspective. After exhaustive review and then lots and lots of public input, they decide on what to build. So people say, oh, I don't like paying for that. Yet, if you think about it, that transmission is actually helping make costs lower and making things more reliable.
Duane Highley:Transmission is one of the very best investments out there. It's a low risk, guaranteed regulatory rate of return. If you can just get the line built and in the air, you're gonna earn return on that for decades, fifty, sixty years into the future.
Elizabeth Schilling:So SPP is planning further into the future for the transmission side and if we need to upgrade. But then when we look at the energy side, how are they dispatching energy?
Duane Highley:Right now today, Tri-State, all of our load is in an a market of some kind, but it's an imbalanced market. So it's an instantaneous market just designed to optimize what you've currently got online for your plants. So if you've got an expensive plant on, but your neighbor has a cheap plant on, in real time, it'll say, don't even start a power plant you don't need. If you've already started it, now we'll try to optimize. That's what's currently happening in the real time markets.
Duane Highley:But under the SPP day ahead market, what will happen is in the morning, everybody that owns generating resources will bid them to the market. We'll say, here we expect this amount of wind to come in tomorrow. We expect to have gas generation available at this price at these different locations. We expect to have coal generation in at this price at these locations. We give all that information to SPP, all of us, and that all goes into their computer along with the load projections for the coming day, where all that load is located, delivery point by delivery point.
Duane Highley:Every single transformer out there at the wholesale level is modeled. And then their computer says, okay. Tomorrow, the best plan would be this. And you get to run your power plant, but you don't get to run your power plant. And that saves hundreds of millions of dollars across a footprint.
Duane Highley:Mark is a largely dependent degree to which you can predict your own future in terms of what your loads might be and for your imminent resources, how they might perform. Now I'll say this, wind forecasts have gotten really good to the point where we will make money on wind bidding it into the market. We will have enough clarity on when it's available. And the more accurate we are, the better we'll do it optimizing that revenue. That's a good thing.
Julia Eshleman:That's where the cost efficiencies are coming in. We already talked about transmission. You're not building duplicative transmission, which is just insanely expensive. You're not generating too much because the cost to even turn something on is expensive for the thermal units.
Duane Highley:Right.
Julia Eshleman:You're not also generating too little, which means you have to go out and purchase more. It's like a Goldilocks thing.
Duane Highley:Yes. Yeah. Very much. My porridge is too hot, too cold. No.
Duane Highley:It's just right. Oh, I broke the chair. Crap. Whoops. Get out of the house.
Duane Highley:That's the Goldilocks story. The part that we like is the I'm not too hot, not too cold. They'll start figuring out how that all works in terms of how does that SPP market engine tending to solve, and they'll find opportunities to even make that better.
Julia Eshleman:Is that how an RTO kind of drives down costs in general if everybody is paying a little bit less for power? It's just balancing everybody out?
Duane Highley:Yes. There's the short term, which is don't run a plant that shouldn't have been running today or don't run it as hard as you'd plan to because you don't need it. Your neighbors got surplus. Why are you running yours? Yours is expensive.
Duane Highley:That's an initial immediate savings. And the longer term savings is it'd be great if you could get more Laramie River power delivered into New Mexico, but there's not enough transmission. And maybe Laramie isn't even able to stay fully loaded all year long because there's not any place for its power to go in some months of the year, and yet it's a low cost resource. There's enormous bottlenecks in the West today. Much worse in general, I'd say, than the Eastern grid.
Duane Highley:Again, because we haven't had that presence of an overall coordinating body looking at it. There is a severe inability to move power. Part of it's just geographic reality. We've got mountains and problems like that. But also having somebody say, if you do this, it may not save you money next year and so maybe you don't have a lot of incentive to do it.
Duane Highley:But over the next sixty years, it's gonna save a billion dollars. So how about you build that line? And that's where they'll do those studies and make that happen.
Julia Eshleman:People don't think of power that way geographically, but actually joining a larger footprint is better because then you have more options you can pick from, and it makes you more efficient. And they're also the ones going, hey. It actually doesn't make sense to build transmission down there. This guy is already doing it. It's gonna be way more efficient.
Julia Eshleman:You're gonna save a ton. You don't have to build that. Let these guys build it, and we'll all drive costs down together.
Duane Highley:We've got a great example in our backyard. Xcel has built the Colorado Pathways project, or they're currently building it. We built Burlington to Lamar. Well, if there'd been a central inter entity coordinating all that, I'm pretty sure they would have found one transmission line that would have been met both of our needs and ordered it to happen.
Julia Eshleman:What's the benefit of moving to an RTO from the markets that we're already participating in?
Duane Highley:Currently, we're in imbalanced markets, which is just real time balancing of resources that are already online. It is good, and it's better than not having one. And it says there's little bit of surplus here. There's a little bit of deficit here. But that's a relatively small degree of savings relative to what could be saved if you were truly looking ahead and saying, how's this week gonna play out?
Duane Highley:And maybe I'd have a different strategy for which resources I was deploying and when. But the other thing is in a full RTO, you're planning ahead also for the transmission. That all comes together under one construct, and that's another tremendous benefit of an RTO is depancaking. We call it depancaking transmission rates. Right now, Tri-State operates in seven different balancing areas.
Duane Highley:If we wanna move power from one balancing area to another, we pay another transmission cost, the cost to rent their transmission facilities to move that power. We say those transmission rates pancake because if I wanna just move it to my neighboring balancing area, b a, we call it, that's one rate. If I wanna move it two b a's away, now I've gotta pay the first rate plus the second rate, and those rates stack on top of each other like pancake. If I try to get three or four balancing areas away, suddenly that pancakes get pretty tall and the cost gets pretty high. So I just won't move that power because it no longer becomes cost effective for me to transfer the power.
Duane Highley:Somebody needs it, but by the time it gets to them, it's so expensive that they can't afford it. Well, under an RTO, there's one balancing area. There's not eight different balancing areas. And there's one price to move the power from any point in that balancing area to any other point. It's a postage stamp rate, they call it.
Duane Highley:That debottlenecks a lot just right there to say, now if you need power, but you're three what would have been three balancing areas away, now there's just one cost to move that power to you. And suddenly, it may be cost effective to move that.
Julia Eshleman:As a not for profit, you have to look at avoided cost before anything, especially when something has a twenty five or fifty year lifespan. If you're not for profit and you're trying not to raise rates, the benefit of the RTO is they are having that holistic view. When you're able to couple transmission and market outlooks together, that's a huge saving.
Duane Highley:What's great about us and the way we look at SPP is it's such a similar organization. It's a nonprofit. We're nonprofit. It's member driven. We're member driven.
Duane Highley:And there's a great alignment of interest. They care about reliability and affordability. We care about reliability and affordability. Neither one of us is worried about whether some shareholder makes a dollar on this transaction. And yet there's a lot of industrial utilities who are also very strong advocates for RTOs.
Duane Highley:And they get pressure from the regulatory bodies. There's a reason why the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, why the state general assembly, I should say, passed a law that said people have to be in an organized market by the end of the decade because they said there's gonna be benefits. The Colorado PUC study said there'd be hundreds of millions of dollars of benefits if all the utilities would join. We are joining, but we're doing it early because we're like, why wait to start saving money? Why wait till twenty thirty?
Duane Highley:Let's start saving now.
Julia Eshleman:Let's save the pancakes for Cracker Barrel.
Elizabeth Schilling:Yay. What was the process like leading up to this? This is not a new initiative.
Duane Highley:I'm trying to remember the date. It was way back. I was working in Arkansas. I was in the Eastern grid, but our cooperative was a member of SPP. And I was in the members committee back in the previous instance of trying to form RTOS, which I guess was 2013 with a go live date expected to happen in 2019.
Duane Highley:Obviously, that didn't happen. We've been working since '18 to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, and we have. And now we've got it.
Julia Eshleman:Were we in FERC in 2018, or did that happen later?
Duane Highley:It happened in 2020.
Julia Eshleman:So with the circumstances changing and the added member flexibility and all of that stuff, do you think we're in a better spot now than when we had started initially?
Duane Highley:Yeah. No question. RTL West was a good step and would have been a good step forward, but we had to make a lot of compromises at that time. And some of the compromises weren't fun, but, I mean, you never get everything you want in a deal. Tri-State still assess the deal was better than no deal.
Duane Highley:But I'll say the current instance of SPP West is even better than what had been envisioned in Markets West that was the 2018 initiative.
Elizabeth Schilling:What does this mean for the future of reliable energy in the West?
Duane Highley:Oh, it's fantastic. We first of we get a resource adequacy construct. Instead of players out there that don't have to follow the rules, SPP will say, you don't get to play in the market if you don't bring the reserves to the table. And if you don't bring reserves, we're gonna charge you for reserves. You're gonna pay for them.
Duane Highley:You may as well put something online. That's fantastic news. And that means going forward, they're doing long term studies. They're informing what should reserve margins be as a result of the mix of generation on. We'll be doing our own studies as well, but that's that first reliability piece in terms of adequate capacity.
Duane Highley:There's the reliability piece in terms of having adequate transmission to not only serve reliability. There might be areas that currently don't have enough to assure you that you're always gonna have what you need, especially with projected growth and data centers and things. Their studies can say, here's where you need transmission lines. But also not just the reliability lines, but then the lines you might want to optimize cost. Okay.
Duane Highley:You don't really need additional transmission here, but if you had it, your cost would be lower because you could move low cost energy into an area that doesn't have access to it. Both people at both ends of the line benefit. If I'm paying a lot for power because I can't get to cheap power, and I'm over here with cheap power but can't get it to somebody who wants to pay for it, having that line there has an ability to flow that power and flatten the cost. And so we'll flatten out those locational marginal prices. And there won't be as much disparity, and that's savings for both the buyer and the seller.
Julia Eshleman:For SPP, what authority do they have to ensure that there is reliability on the system, that we have enough power plants, or that the transmission is up to date?
Duane Highley:Don't operate the facilities, and they don't own the facilities. They're a nonprofit coordinator of all that. But they do have some stroke. Congress has delegated FERC, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the authority under the Federal Power Act to make sure things work. FERC said, okay.
Duane Highley:Our contractor for assuring that is gonna be NERC, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. Now NERC has the responsibility in a contract with federal government to write mandatory enforceable standards for utilities, which can be audited, and you can even fail your audit and get fines and penalties from NERC. So there's teeth behind it to say you're gonna operate your systems in a way that's reliable, includes cybersecurity standards to make sure you don't have just a really stupid Internet line coming into the middle of your power plant so that anybody can hack into it. And it's just layer upon layer, and we can complain about those standards, but they actually make the grid more reliable.
Julia Eshleman:Was SPP acting as I don't wanna say enforcer, but are they the ones keeping the utilities that join in check to make sure that they're hitting all of these reliability regulations?
Duane Highley:Yes. In their role as an RC, we call it the reliability coordinator RC. There's different reliability coordinators across The United States. There has to be one everywhere. Our reliability coordinator is Southwest Power Pool.
Duane Highley:They don't that's not the RTO part of it, but that's just the kinda keeping a check and making sure you follow all the NERC rules part of it. And so we do have to do that.
Julia Eshleman:If we get the RTO transition right, what does the grid look like in ten years?
Duane Highley:In ten years, we'll be starting some new large transmission construction, just beginning to complete some of the first lines that SPP studies when they get formed in April. So if you think about ten years, we'll be finishing that first block of transmission resources that they would have identified from their studies, which makes things more reliable, which also makes power costs less variable across the grid so that people don't have to suffer from congestion costs. And just because you're in a bad part of the country doesn't mean you get stuck with higher power prices. And maybe you're stuck with a resource you can't move to the areas that need it. Flatter and more stable power prices and more reliability because more people will be involved in a resource adequacy construct that has mandatory enforceable standards behind it.
Duane Highley:And hopefully, we'll see a lot more participants in SPP. We see this as a beachhead to bring in SPP West. We know there'll be other utilities joining. SPP also has a number of utilities all the way out to the Pacific Ocean currently that are engaged in what they call markets plus, which is an RTO light. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles on the RTO, but it's an easy point of entry.
Duane Highley:You still get the market benefits, and we believe that those people, once they participate in SPP markets plus for a number of years, will start seeing the broader benefits of being part of an entire RTO. We're excited about that because a large number of utility participants that could start shading in the map more for SPP and moving more towards California and certainly moving all the way out to the West Coast.
Elizabeth Schilling:Thank you, Duane, for joining us today. This was a lot of good information. I think we got some exciting milestones we're about to hit, so appreciate your time.
Duane Highley:Yeah. Thank you so much.
Elizabeth Schilling:Thanks for tuning in to Western Watts. You can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcast, YouTube, or on our website at tristate.coop/wwpod. We'll catch you next time.