Mountrail-Williams Electric Cooperative Becomes Part Of The Southwest Power Pool -- December 29, 2015

From The Williston Herald:

A Williams County power company has just taken a big leap that positions it to to make a bigger mark on the nation’s energy map.

Mountrail Williams Electric Cooperative, on the eve of celebrating its 25th anniversary, was recently welcomed as the newest member of the Southwest Power Pool, a nonprofit Regional Transmission Organization that manages the electric grid and the wholesale energy market in the Central United States.

The SPP blueprint now stretches across 14 states from North Dakota to Texas in the south.

The move will allow Mountrail Williams to finally export power to other regions, something it has been unable to do before.

Under the new arrangement, Basin Electric, which has also joined the same pool, still supplies power to Mountrail Williams. But both entities will now have instantaneous access to the wider energy market to sell excess power from the region.

SPP is a nonprofit Regional Transmission Organization. It expanded from eight states to 14 in June, with North Dakota among the new territories. The other new states included South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Minnesota and Iowa.

And more:

“They’re going to look at that whole map from North Dakota all the way to Texas,” Haugen says.

”It will enhance our transmission grid by being able to drive power in and out. We were only able to drive in before. It’s not going to be one way any more, and that could mean a big future cycle combined power plant. We’re not an island any more. This is huge. Huge.”

That type of expansion could someday mean that natural gas, which is presently being flared, could instead become cheap power for areas that need it throughout the Central U.S.

While that particular development may be some distance away in the future, wind farms are already in the works, and that will be something the region’s power companies, including Mountrail Williams, hope to capitalize on in the wider energy markets. The wider benefit of that, Haugen suggested, is a continued downward pressure on regional power prices.