Strategic Planning

Western Area Power Administration has begun a strategic planning process to define Westernwide priorities that ensure Western's continued success well into the future. This is particularly important, at this time, given the unprecedented number of new requests and mandates we are receiving as an agency. Ultimately, an action plan will be developed to focus Western on priorities that reflect the current demands and opportunities as well as those that are on the horizon.

Where is Western at in the planning process?

Western is now identifying specific strategies and actions geared toward positioning Western to successfully meet increasing core business requirements and to take advantage of opportunities to help meet the energy needs of the West. We plan to continue working on an action plan over this next year.

• Strategic Planning update - March 2008 (29 kb pdf)
• Strategic Planning update - Feb. 2008 (246 kb pdf)

How will customers be involved in the process?

At an early point and well before final decisions are made, customers will be asked for input on any ideas that could evolve into major initiatives. To provide the most recent information on strategic planning and to get early customer input, customer meetings were held Feb. 12 and 14 in Phoenix and Loveland. Western is currently evaluating comments and questions from customers received since the February customer meetings.

Follow-up customer meeting held April 24

Western presented its Operations Consolidation proposal at a meeting with customers on April 24.  The meeting was a follow-up to the February 2008 customer meetings held on our strategic planning process.

What issues are being considered?
The strategic planning process initially focused on six business issues:

• Financing and funding
• Renewables
• Transmission and power resources - marketing and risk
• Transmission congestion management, reliability and operations
• Tribal relations
• Strategic organizational capabilities

Those broad issues have been refined through study and deliberation into strategies for further consideration and evaluation:

Strategy 1 - Maintain and strengthen Western's ability to participate in large-scale transmission projects to improve Western's transmission infrastructure, maintain or enhance system reliability, support customer projects, and/or increase overall effectiveness of the transmission system.

Action 1 - Improve accuracy of future workload projections associated with likely transmission reliability and expansion needs.

Action 2 - Explore the feasibility of identifying injection points for new generation, based upon available transmission capacity, onto Western's system.

Action 3 - Help to address constrained paths by identifying a transmission congestion relief project under Energy Policy Act of 2005 that could also involve renewable generation.

Strategy 2 - Explore operations consolidation as a way to become more efficient and to minimize future costs due to increasing work requirements associated with FERC's open access transmission and electric reliability standard requirements.

Strategy 3 - Gain efficiencies and strengthen merchant services.

Action 1 - Explore the feasibility of increased merchant function coordination and/or consolidation.

Action 2 - Strengthen transmission and resources marketing services in order to increase our capabilities, gain more market knowledge and enhance customer relationships.

Strategy 4 - Meet the increasing demands on maintenance from transmission growth and compliance requirements.

Action 1 - Reduce the amount of time our craft workforce spends on administrative tasks so they can spend more time doing maintenance activities. 

Strategy 5 - Continue to support development of renewabgle resources and increase visibility of Western's activities in the renewable resources arena.

Action 1 - Explore renewable energy purchase request for interest.

Action 2 - Explore the possibility of adding to the scope of existing renewable resources studies, using non-reimbursable funding, to incorporate renewables into Western's tansmission system.

Action 3 - Develop and implement a renewable resources communications strategy.

Strategy 6 - Increase the visibility of Western's partnerships with Native American tribes.

Strategy 7 - Strengthen Western's organizational capabilities and design the organization to meet growing demands. 

Action 1 - Improve how Westernwide transmission activities are administered and lead to ensure Western is organized properly to effectively and consistently comply with transmission service commitments and EPAct 2005 requirements.

Action 2 - Develop an action plan to help facilitate clearing the queue of requests for interconnection to Western's system.

Action 3 - Take action to address the critical shortage of planning engineers throughout the industry.

Action 4 - Look at other opportunities for improving organizational efficiency.

Action 5 - Look at overall organizational capabilities.

 Strategy 8 - Strengthen Western's financial ability to meet commitments and changing requirements. 

Action 1 - Formalize the decision-making process on new large projects.

Action 2 - Develop financing and cash flow strategies to support the strategic initiatives.

Action 3 - Develop and implement an enterprise risk management approach.

 Strategy 9 - Create an internal and external communications strategy for every aspect of the strategic plan.