Transmission providers are beginning to charge for ancillary services. Outage insurance has also become available. There are more players, other than utilities, in the market buying and selling which may create credit risks. Risks in the past included unplanned outages at the Laramie River Station or weather-related risks. Because of the stable pricing these risks were not that adverse.
Current risks are credit risks and outage risks.
However, today the outages cost a lot more money. MRES is looking at ways to minimize these risks. Some of the future risks are retail competition and transmission availability. MRES will continue to reduce its risk, improve its debt to equity ratio, eliminate pancake transmission rates, insure all members of the same independent system operator, and studying pooling resources with others. He discussed the complexity of MRES's transmission.