BPA Transitions to New Outage Management System Feeding PTDF Calculations

BPA has transitioned to a new Outage Management System (OMS) as of March 2022.  The new OMS allows BPA to improve process standardization and increase automation in outage submission, scheduling, coordination and reporting.

On August 15th, 2023, BPA will begin to utilize outages from the new OMS in calculating BPA’s outage-informed Power Transfer Distribution Factors (PTDFs).  Outage-informed PTDFs are used in both the evaluation of short-term Transmission Service Requests and the calculation of short-term Available Transfer Capability (ATC).  There will be some shifts in the outage-informed PTDFs and short-term ATC when this change occurs.  BPA anticipates that this change will be deployed into our ATC software between 1:30pm to 2:30pm on August 15th, 2023.

Customers will not see any changes to the Short Term Original Transmission Service Request Calculator or the Short Term Redirect Transmission Service Request Calculator found on Transmission Availability - Bonneville Power Administration (bpa.gov).  These calculators are based on all lines in service PTDFs.  The all lines in service PTDFs will not be impacted by this transition.

Please contact your Account Executive or send an email to techforum@bpa.gov with any questions about this upcoming change.