BPA Delaying Transition to New Outage Management System Feeding PTDF Calculations

Due to heat wave conditions in the region, BPA is delaying its transition to use of outages from its new Outage Management System (OMS) in calculating BPA's outage-informed Power Transfer Distribution Factors (PTDFs) from Tuesday, August 15th, 2023 to Thursday, August 17th 2023. Out of an abundance of caution, BPA does not want to make changes to operational systems while the heat wave is stressing the transmission system.

As communicated in the previous Tech Forum message sent on August 8th, 2023, 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 17th, 2023.

In March 2022, BPA transitioned to a new OMS. The new OMS allows BPA to improve process standardization and increase automation in outage submission, scheduling, coordination and reporting.

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 delay.