Power Committee discussion focuses on updated timeline for Ninth Power Plan, releasing second draft

The Council's Power Committee met Friday, Oct. 23, and discussed a new timeline for the Ninth Power Plan that includes releasing a second draft, potentially in December.

The Council voted unanimously Aug. 11 to release the draft power plan for a 65-day public review and comment period, which closed Oct. 16. During this comment period, in a dialogue with Bonneville Power Administration staff, the Power Division identified an error in the model setup for GENESYS, the Council's hydro operations model.

Power Planning Director Jennifer Light and Manager of Planning and Analysis John Ollis briefed the committee on the issue (read presentation | watch video). Light also discussed proposed additional modeling to provide more information to the Council to inform an updated resource strategy. This includes re-running a handful of sensitivities with the corrected information. Light closed the meeting with a discussion of an updated timeline for completion of the plan.

Council staff will provide more details explaining how they've updated GENESYS to address the issue, as well as share results of new model runs, during two upcoming Resource Adequacy and System Analysis Advisory Committee meetings in November. The Council is also hosting a question-and-answer session on Nov. 19. Each meeting is open to the public. The details for each meeting are as follows:

• Tuesday, Nov. 3, from 9am-1pm (PT). Register to attend online here.
• Thursday, Nov. 19, from 10am-3pm (PT). Register to attend online here.
• Thursday, Nov. 19 Q&A workshop from 3pm-4pm - register here.

The Council has identified a process to guide the development, release, and public review and comment of the new resource strategy and the Ninth Plan's second draft:

• November 17-18 (Portland) - Continue development of draft plan, updated modeling results and a review of comments related to the resource strategy in the draft Plan. Discussion and staff recommendation of potential changes on comments received on other aspects of the power plan
• December 2 (Webinar) - Extra work session with the Council to continue development of draft Plan. Discussion of updated resource strategy and related recommendation. Continued work on addressing other comments from the draft plan, as needed
• December 15-16 (Portland) - Potential release of a second draft Ninth Plan

This updated timeline puts adoption of the final version of the Ninth Power Plan in the early months of 2027.