Southwest Power Pool official tells Kansas committee wind leads regional mix as transmission projects surge

Mike Ross, senior vice president for external affairs at Southwest Power Pool, told the House Committee on Energy, Utilities and Telecommunications that SPP manages operations, a wholesale market and regional transmission planning across 14 states and serves more than 18 million people.

"We run the electric grid for all or part of 14 states, keep the lights on, facilitate the wholesale electric market, and plan high-voltage transmission for the entire region," Ross said.

Ross said SPP does not own generation or construct facilities; it operates as a nonprofit designated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that administers tariffs and coordinates members’ activity. He described SPP’s governance: member committees draft policy, an independent board reviews it and a Regional State Committee gives state regulators a seat at the table.

The presentation summarized the current and projected fuel mix: wind accounted for about 38% of regional generation last year and is the top source overall; natural gas rose to about 28% and surpassed coal in production; coal was about 24%, nuclear about 5% and hydro about 3%. Ross said Kansas’s in-state generation is roughly 51% wind, 24% coal, about 9% gas and 16% nuclear contributing to the regional total.

Ross also detailed changing resource dynamics. He said SPP’s studies show large planned additions: roughly 35% of future energy capacity in the 14-state footprint is solar, about 20% battery storage, nearly 19% more wind and nearly 12,000 megawatts of additional natural-gas-fired capacity planned across the region. He noted that wind’s variability increases the need for dispatchable resources — often fast-start natural gas units — to meet sudden shortfalls.

On transmission, Ross said SPP’s independent board has issued notices to construct roughly $12 billion of transmission upgrades, and late last year approved an additional $7.7 billion including the region’s first 765 kV project. He said cost allocation rules spread the cost of very large lines across the region, while smaller projects are paid locally under a formula set by the Regional State Committee.

Committee members asked how Kansas’s lack of a formal state energy plan affects SPP’s work, whether Kansas uses local gas supplies to fuel new plants, and how SPP will handle wildfire and other Western-state reliability risks as the RTO expands westward. Ross and Kansas Corporation Commission member Andrew French said SPP’s planning is region-wide and largely agnostic to whether a single state has a formal energy plan; SPP studies interregional flows and accommodates whatever resources utilities and regulators choose to develop.

Ross said the planned RTO expansion to parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona and additional Western states is expected to take effect in 2026; a separate contracted product called Markets Plus may go live in 2027 for entities not ready to join a full RTO. He told the committee SPP-generated wholesale market savings across the 14-state region were approximately $3.62 billion last year, and argued regional coordination reduces costs and improves reliability compared with being an isolated balancing authority.

The briefing closed with committee members raising concerns about bill impacts on customers, data centers’ demand for large blocks of power and the pace and cost of new local generation and transmission. Ross cautioned that leaving the RTO would carry multi‑billion-dollar exit costs, significant operational build-out and likely higher retail costs, while membership lets Kansas share transmission costs across the wider region.

Less critical details: members asked about small modular reactors and storage duration; Ross said SMRs may have a future but are not in near-term service and that current utility-scale batteries typically provide about four hours of storage, which helps for short peaks but is not sufficient alone in prolonged extreme events.