In mid-July, REAP Executive Director Chris Rose was named as an unaffiliated member of the 14-person Railbelt Reliability Council Implementation Committee (RRC-IC). Since that time, the RRC-IC has begun meeting on a weekly basis to develop Articles of Incorporation, Bylaws, a Code of Conduct and other foundational documents for the Railbelt Reliability Council (RRC). After those documents are completed and the RRC has incorporated, it is expected to apply to the Regulatory Commission of Alaska (RCA) sometime in the fall of 2021 to become the Electric Reliability Organization (ERO) for the Railbelt electric grid.
The ERO for the Railbelt will develop and enforce regional reliability standards, develop system-wide non-discriminatory open access standards for the transmission system and oversee regional integrated resource planning that will determine what generation and transmission projects are constructed in the future. The RRC-IC is hoping that the RRC will be certified by the RCA to become the Railbelt’s ERO, at which time the IC members would become the RRC’s first board of directors.
Other voting members of the RRC-IC are representatives of the six Railbelt utilities, a consumer organization (AkPIRG), two independent power producers (Cook Inlet Region, Inc. and Alaska Environmental Power), the Alaska Energy Authority and former Northwest Power Pool President Jerry Rust. The RRC-IC also includes ex-officio members from the Alaska Attorney General’s office and the RCA.
In March, the state legislature passed SB 123 to mandate that an ERO be formed through an application process to the RCA, which must certify the applicant has the capacity to carry out the functions of the ERO while complying with the regulations that implement the legislation. The RCA initiated a rulemaking process to implement SB 123 in early June, and that process must be completed by July 1, 2021. REAP has also been an active participant in that rulemaking process, which includes technical conferences to discuss the many areas where rules must be promulgated by the Commission to put the new law into practice.