Southwest Power Pool first regional organization to serve more than 90 percent of demands with renewable energy

New records for renewable energy production and penetration were set this week by Southwest Power Pool (SPP), which served 90.2 percent of its 14-state territory’s electricity demands with renewable sources.

It marked the first time a regional transmission organization had crossed the 90 percent mark with renewables and beat out last year’s record-setting 87.5 percent. Most of this record came from wind sources, with 88.5 percent wind penetration.

“In a decade’s time, our region has gone from thinking of 25% renewable-penetration levels as nearly unreachable to a point where we regularly exceed 75% without reliability concerns,” Bruce Rew, SPP senior vice president of Operations, said. “We’re able to manage wind generation more effectively than other, smaller systems can because we’ve got a huge pool of resources to draw from.”

Additionally, SPP hosts more than 66 GW of renewables in its generator interconnection queue, waiting to be connected to the power grid. However, this week, it set records with 23,802 MW of renewable energy produced, beating out the previous record of 21,820 MW set earlier this year. It also beat the last record wind by more than 1,000 MW, achieving production of 22,915 MW and putting it to use from the Canadian border in Montana to as far south as Texas.