Please note that Southwest Power Pool (SPP) has again extended the current Conservative Operations Advisory effective for its entire 14-state balancing authority (BA) area through Thursday, July 21, at 10 p.m. Central time (CT). The advisory was previously scheduled to end tonight, Wednesday, July 20, at 10 p.m. but because of continued high loads and risks regarding the availability of generation resources, SPP has extended it for an additional 24 hours.
Concurrent to the Conservative Operations Advisory, because of pervasive high temperatures, high region-wide electricity use, and uncertainty in its wind forecast, SPP also issued a Resource Advisory effective July 17 at 12:00 noon through Thursday, July 21, at 10 p.m. Both the Resource Advisory and the extended Conservative Operations Advisory are now expected to end on July 21 at 10 p.m.
Neither Resource Advisories nor Conservative Operations Advisories require the public to conserve energy. SPP has provided instructions on applicable procedures to generation and transmission operators and will send additional information if necessary or as conditions change.
SPP issues Conservative Operations Advisories to signal to utilities that own and operate transmission and generation facilities that there is a need to operate the bulk power system more conservatively to mitigate risks associated with weather, environmental, operational, terrorist, cyber or other events. SPP issues Resource Advisories when extreme weather, significant outages, and/or wind- and load-forecast uncertainty are expected in its service territory. While under a Resource Advisory, to mitigate risk associated with the factors described above SPP may commit generation in its day-ahead market earlier than under standard operating procedures and commit generating resources in Reliability status.
The following chart shows the relative severity of each level of advisories and alerts including those currently in effect.