A little more than two years ago, a clean energy record was broken. For the first time, a regional transmission organization met more than 90% of its electric demand, called load, with renewable power.
But if you don’t follow the electric industry closely, you might be surprised where it happened.
On March 29, 2022, Southwest Power Pool, based in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the grid operator for a red-state heavy portion of the central U.S., hit a renewable penetration level of 90.2%, almost all of it from wind power.
“In a decade’s time, our region has gone from thinking of 25% renewable-penetration levels as nearly unreachable to a point where we regularly exceed 75% without reliability concerns,” said Bruce Rew, SPP’s vice president of…
