On January 2, 2018, the California Independent System Operator
Corp. ("CAISO") announced plans to become its own
reliability coordinator by spring 2019. The plan will require CAISO
to withdraw from Peak Reliability, the current reliability
coordinator for the Western Interconnection. Although the full
suite of reliability services to be offered remains unclear, CAISO
stated that it will offer outage coordination, day-ahead planning,
and real-time monitoring reliability services.
As stated in the announcement, although CAISO has long supported
having a single reliability coordinator in the Western
interconnection, recent developments have prompted CAISO to
reevaluate the apparent cost-effectiveness of this arrangement.
First, in the fall of 2017, Mountain West Transmission Group
announced plans to join the Southwest Power Pool, which, CAISO
stated, would increase costs to the remaining participants served
by Peak Reliability. Second and more recently, Peak Reliability
