Alstom delivered its e-terra energy market management solutions on time for Southwest Power Pool’s (SPP) day-ahead and real-time integrated marketplace. The new market system combines 16 separate energy entities (consisting of investor-owned utilities, public power, municipalities and electric cooperatives) in the southwestern region of the U.S., into one.

These entities manage energy resources, and ensure that there is sufficient power generation at any time to reliably supply electricity. The new system is expected to realize up to $100 million in annual net benefits.

SPP is a regional transmission organization (RTO) that operates the power grid in nine states, serving 15 million customers in the southwestern region of the U.S. Its new marketplace will optimize energy reserve sharing, providing member utilities access to more diverse power generation resources. It will also facilitate the reliable integration of the region’s vast renewable resources, including 90 GW of potential wind generation.

Signed in May 2011, Alstom deployed its e-terra 3.0 suite of applications with market operations and settlements technology, to solve complex energy scheduling and massive financial calculations with minimal resources. The same software is already used in other regional US markets to handle over 1,000 terawatt hours and $40 billion of energy transactions per year.

The project also included an upgrade of Alstom’s network modeling and energy management systems, helping SPP to better manage reliability and outages across the region.