Functional requirements for Southwest Power Pool Energy Imbalance market dispatch

This paper discusses high-level functional requirements of the Energy Imbalance Service (EIS) market for the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) Regional Transmission Organization (RTO), in the USA. SPP has taken a controlled and step-by-step approach towards a full market model. Therefore, SPP has tried to introduce the EIS market on top of the traditional Market Participant (MP) activities with minimal impact. Currently in SPP, the EIS market is providing a central pool dispatch of energy imbalance in the Real-Time (RT) operations without Day-Ahead (DA) energy or Ancillary Services (AS) markets. Offering resources into the market is voluntary. This model of the light-weight electricity market is quite different than other major markets in the US, especially those in the northeast. The focus of this paper is on the dispatch model in the EIS market with emphasis on different constraint types. The EIS market dispatch is based on the nodal pricing like other major US electricity markets.