Understanding the Organizations Working in Transmission

Interconnecting solar and storage projects at the transmission level is far more complex than interconnection at a smaller scale, and the challenge is growing. According to the Department of Energy’s 2024 Transmission Interconnection Roadmap, while the early 2000s saw around 500-1,000 transmission interconnection requests annually, today that number has surged to 2,500-3,000 requests each year – representing up to 750 GWs of proposed new generation capacity. This massive increase is putting pressure on the organizations that manage our transmission system. But who exactly are these organizations?

Let’s tune into an excerpt from Tim Taylor, instructor for the free Navigating Transmission Interconnection Queues course, to learn more about the different ownership types in the transmission space along with a quick introduction to ISOs and RTOs. To dive deeper into the topic, enroll for free in Navigating Transmission Interconnection Queues. 

Transcript below.

With transmission, there are several ownership types. If you are a developer developing projects for connection to transmission, you may be dealing with one or several of these different types of ownership structures. 

This includes investor-owned utilities. They sell stock, so they’re publicly owned. Then there are government agencies, such as the U.S. government and municipalities. Then there are cooperative generation transmission organizations, and these co-ops are actually owned by the members that they serve. 

One of the primary purposes of transmission – and this was the intent ever since the start of the industry back before 1900 – was to connect large generating sources to the load centers where the load is concentrated, like in the middle of cities. Of utmost importance is safety and reliability. Keep the lights on for abnormal conditions. 

Abnormal conditions happen all the time on transmission. You get short circuit faults due to lightning or tree contact or other reasons. There are a lot of different causes of abnormal conditions on transmission, but the transmission providers have to ensure that the system stays reliable. When they’re connecting new generation to the system, what this entails is a lot of different studies and analysis to make sure that the new generation isn’t going to mess up the reliability of that existing transmission system. 

 Now, there are other types of organizations in the transmission industry besides the transmission owners that we just mentioned. The two types of organizations you’ll hear a lot about are ISOs and RTOs. 

If you are connecting new generation to transmission, you may very well run into the ISOs & RTOs, because they’re the ones that actually run the queues. For the most part, they do the studies or they work with the transmission owners or consultants in order to do the interconnection studies. ISOs & RTOs, for the most part, they’re the same for our purposes with very minor differences. There are seven of them in the U.S., as you see here, plus there’s two more in Canada. There are multiple purposes of these ISOs & RTOs, but one of the biggest ones when it comes to interconnection is providing what they call non discriminatory access to the electric grid. That means that any generator or load who wants to access the grid can do so as long as they meet certain qualifications or certain requirements, and in many cases, if they help pay for system upgrades. 

Some of the other purposes of ISOs & RTOs include the grid operation, the monitoring, and the management in the region that they serve. They’re in charge of generation dispatch to keep the generation supply and demand in balance. They also do regional planning and reliability modeling and planning, so they do quite a bit.