**Executive Summary & Conclusion**

The overall design for Grid West regional services emphasizes physical
power transactions among its participants by making transmission
capacity available to Grid West participants. In line with this goal,
TSLG has focused on developing and refining processes and services that
maximize access to GWT for Grid West participants through acquisition of
transmission rights in an efficient, equitable and timely manner. The
various reconfiguration services (RCS) were specifically proposed for
Grid West for this purpose and TSLG has worked extensively on designing
RCS in such a way to meet this critical Grid West regional services
goal.

A Day-Ahead Redispatch (RDS) feature was included in the Regional
Proposal[^1] as basic feature of Grid West. The purpose of the RDS was
to enable greater use of the transmission system by getting advance
scheduling commitments. However, major difficulties were encountered in
attempting to design such the RDS during the Layer 1 work of the TSLG.
Two primary implementation difficulties were encountered, that appeared
to have the potential for creating market gaming opportunities.

-   First, since participation would be voluntary only some schedules
    would be constrained by the day-ahead redispatch. Yet since all
    parties scheduling is so constrained, the congestion optimization
    achieved by the redispatch could be undone by parties who retain and
    use their pre-existing scheduling flexibility after the day-ahead
    process ends.

-   Second, measurement of performance would be problematic. A voluntary
    day-ahead redispatch is a partial energy market. Such day-ahead
    energy markets must be settled against real-time energy deliveries.
    However all participants in the day-ahead redispatch would not be
    subject to a single set of prices of real-time balancing energy
    prices, so how is reconciliation to occur? Some parties would be in
    the CCA where a set of consistent real-time prices would apply,
    while prices outside the CCA would have to be based on OATT tariff
    concepts or some other price indicator.

    When the day-ahead redispatch issue was revisited by TSLG at the
    start of the Layer 2 work, the reconfiguration service was better
    understood than during the Layer 1 discussion of RDS. In reviewing
    the intended purpose of the RDS, it became clear that the desired
    effect (getting parties to release a portion of their scheduling
    flexibility, i.e. commit to a generation plan day-ahead) could be
    accomplished through the Daily Reconfiguration Service (D-RCS). If
    transmission right holders could give up their scheduling
    flexibility in the D-RCS, the \"headspace\"[^2] set aside to
    preserve pre-existing rights would be reduced. That reduced
    \"headspace\" becomes Available Flow Capacity (AFC) that can be sold
    as Injection-Withdrawal Rights (IWRs). Thus, by enhancing the D-RCS
    to handle releases of scheduling flexibility, Grid West could avoid
    the complications of the RDS while achieving its objective, namely
    making more transmission system capacity available through voluntary
    offers to restrict changes in generation for the following day.

    With this modification, the typical day for pre-scheduling fits
    easily into the general pattern of pre-scheduling used today. Trades
    for the next day occur very early in the morning followed by calls
    to various transmission providers to find out if transmission can be
    found to execute the trades. With this done, pre-schedules are
    submitted to the transmission providers. The enhanced D-RCS replaces
    the calls to find transmission with a central auction where more AFC
    is more readily available by a single process that includes
    pre-release AFC, AFC made available by IWR releases, and AFC freed
    up by releases of scheduling flexibility.

Given the ability to address primary purposes intended for the RDS, TSLG
has suspended any further work on RDS and instead proposes to use the
enhanced D-RCS in its place.

[^1]: "Narrative Description of RRG Platform Group Regional Proposal",
    December 24, 2003, pp. 7-8,
    <http://gridwest.org/Doc/FinalNarrative_RegionalProposal_Dec242003.pdf>.
    The Regional Proposal described a Independent Entity (IE) that has
    since been given the name Grid West.

[^2]: Headspace is a term used to describe the capacity set aside prior
    to an RCS auction to preserve pre-existing rights, including the
    scheduling flexibility (or optionality) of transmission right
    holders to change their schedules after the close of the day-ahead
    scheduling process.