Article: ACA Checkouts

Automating Adjacent Control Area Checkouts Next?

 When I worked on the razor’s edge in a progressive company about 6 years ago, the scheduling manager of a large Eastern utility asked me to propose a checkout solution.  He said, “We calculate that about $1.5 million per year is spent in human labor to verify energy schedules with our adjacent control areas and these new pesky things called marketers.”  That number seemed high to me, but as I listened to his logic, I caught the vision of real-time schedulers and dispatchers spending 5 or ten minutes an hour on this task.  “Add up the cost!” he said.  “I have 8 real-timers on shift at 10 minutes apiece per hour around the clock.  There are 8760 hours per year and so my real-time staff works on this task 11680 person-hours per year.   Throw in another half-dozen after-the-fact staff at 2000 hours each per year for another 12000 person-hours.  Add those numbers and multiply times a modest pay rate of $37 per hour times 1.7 for overhead loading.  That equals $1,489,472 per year.  Then, you must realize that an equal number of employees are working opposite my staff in our neighboring companies at roughly the same cost.  So, there’s about $3 million dollars being consumed for this task!”  Sure enough, when stated that way, it was expensive.

“What else would you have them do with their time?” I asked.  “Aren’t the real-timers on shift and sitting there anyway?”

“I’d have them concentrate on system reliability—you know, operating the system.  The marketers should concentrate on making or saving money.  That’s what we are in business for—not to do bean counting.”

Again, he scored an understatement.  Alas, my job changed and we both moved on, but the question and concept stayed with me.  In today’s world where every interchange schedule is accompanied by a tag, I often wondered how it could be possible for electric utilities, agents, and marketers to still struggle with checkout for 5 or 10 minutes every hour.  Even more surprising is the fact that nearly 30% of the time the adjacent parties disagree with the interchange amount and one or both parties search for the missing or incorrect schedule.  Even though this story took place 6 years ago, I saw the same experience of nearly the same magnitude in a similar control area repeated today.

The problem of checkout difficulties seems to be low enough on the disturb-o-meter that not much is being done to improve it.  But, I would like to propose a grass-roots initiative.  Suppose an application—let’s call it ‘Pool Balance’—was specified and coded by the programming staffs at each location with features described below.  Schedule checkout would take less human time, after-the-fact staff could be more efficient, and the sun would come out on a brighter day!  How would such an application work?  Well, let’s say that Pool Balance is a computer application running inside the firewall on the tag servers of each of the entities that wish to participate.  Each instance of the application has logins, encryption, and the normal level of security to keep the hackers at bay.  Each participant’s Pool Balance application is given the web addresses of the neighboring Pool Balance applications for transmission providers, control areas, and common PSE’s.  In other words, each company operates a Pool Balance application that runs web service communication with other adjacent members.  Each application also contains a limited interface with its host company’s scheduling system and receives net schedule values from it.  They, the Pool Balance applications, message to one another and indicate the amount of imbalance that may exist from time to time.  When all is going well, the entire population of Pool Balance applications will be in balance.  Imbalances will show only when timing latency appears while one company processed a tag or schedule faster than its neighbor.  Real-Time displays could sound an alarm if an imbalance persisted more than a threshold amount—say a minute—or certainly into next hour’s ramp time.  When alarmed, the humans could take over and troubleshoot the missing or incorrect tag or schedule, make reparations within their scheduling systems, and the alarm would clear as soon as the correction was acknowledged by each party’s Pool Balance application.

It would operate as if the tag was the official order form and Pool Balance was the acknowledgement form.  A balance between adjacent parties means that both companies agree not only with the individual details of one or many schedules, but with the totality of all schedules as far as their business practices interpret them.

It would seem to be almost as easy to build such a system as it sounds, but it does require broad support in your area, pool, or region.  So, is there a ‘Pool Balance’ application somewhere in the industry?  Or does the industry just need a standard protocol to be agreed upon so that they can build their own version?  I recommend that the next time schedulers attend a local or regional meeting, this issue be placed on the agenda.  Would it be a panacea and solve world hunger?  No, but it could be an easy implementation for willing participants.  And the reliability benefits would come quickly, closely followed by efficiency and monetary benefits.  The Pool Balance application may become redundant once a regional or national schedule program is eventually perfected by various RTOs, ISOs, or NERC itself.  But would you rather make your own progress while waiting for a national initiative to develop these capabilities?  America’s energy providers are the best and most reliable in the world because of grass-roots ingenuity and can-do attitude.  They can and should invest the effort to enhance this small piece of reliability.