Pacific Northwest Resource Adequacy Forum

In 2005, the Council and the Bonneville Power Administration created the Resource Adequacy Forum and tasked it to develop a consensus-based resource adequacy framework for the Pacific Northwest. The purpose of this framework is to provide a consistent and unambiguous means of assessing whether the region has sufficient deliverable resources to meet its electricity demands reliably and to establish an effective implementation approach to assure an adequate supply for future years. This effort also ties directly to current Western Electricity Coordinating Council efforts to assess west-wide resource adequacy.

On April 16, 2008, the Council adopted the forum’s proposed adequacy standard for the Northwest (Council document 2008-07). The standard is intended to provide an early warning to regional planners should resource development fall dangerously short, that is, should the likelihood of serious curtailment to service exceed the region's tolerance for such events. The standard is not intended to provide a resource planning target nor is it a surrogate for integrated resource planning processes, such as the one used to develop the Council's power plan. The standard takes a regional approach is not intended to be used directly by individual utilities but it does provide useful information that can be incorporated into utility long-term planning efforts.

Currently, the Northwest power supply can adequately provide for the region's annual energy needs and winter peak needs over the next 5 years. The supply is marginally adequate in providing the needs for summer peak demand. This assessment, however, only counts existing resources and those expected to be operational within the next 5 years. Adding expected new resource development, including conservation, as recommended in the Council's power plan alleviates this potential summer-time problem. In conjunction with the Council's planning efforts, regional utilities, including the Bonneville Power Administration, are actively assessing their own future resource needs and are expected to take resource acqusition actions over the next 5 years.

There remain a number of technical and policy issues that the forum’s committees will address over the coming year. Issues such as how to better account for wind and hydro resources will be discussed along with a complete review of the methodology used to assess power supply adequacy.

We encourage your participation in this process. If you wish to add your name to our email lists, please email your request to Gillian Charles  (gcharles@nwcouncil.org).