PES - Transmission Expansion Planning in the West : vTools Events

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PES - Transmission Expansion Planning in the West

#TRANSMISSION #EXPANSION #PLANNING

Our next meeting is scheduled for Thursday, November 12th. At this meeting we will be briefly going over the coming 2016 year and possible tours and technical talks. After this discussion, one of our members, Gary Simonson will be giving a talk on Transmission Expansion Planning in the West. I am really excited about this topic and it's relevancy in the ever-changing energy industry.

Mr. Simonson joined Colorado Springs Utilities(CSU) in 2014 and he currently works in transmission planning. As a Transmission Planning Engineer, Mr. Simonson develops tools, develops base cases, acts as the subject matter expert for modeling standards, runs studies, and produces reports for the CSU planning horizon.

Prior to joining CSU, Mr. Simonson was a Staff Engineer in the grant funded Transmission Expansion Planning group at the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC). In that role, he developed the 10 year transmission topology for WECC’s “Common Case” production cost model (PCM) dataset, developed the 2024 power flow model used in the PCM, took on numerous efforts to introduce synergy between data and modeling used for production cost and power flow studies, performed and coordinated production cost and power flow analyses to identify transmission needs and reliability challenges under a variety of possible energy futures. He also supported the development of WECC’s 20-year capital expansion model, and developed software tools to automate frequent tasks and report study results. Mr. Simonson was the author of the 2024 WECC Common Case Transmission Assumptions, acted as a subject matter expert for WECC’s state of the interconnection report, and was responsible for analyzing the qualified WECC 8760 path flow data.

Prior to joining the transmission planning group at WECC, Mr. Simonson was a Compliance Engineer at WECC. In that role, he led and participated in numerous on site and off site operations and compliance audits in the western interconnect. Mr. Simonson acted as a subject matter expert in resource balancing, demand balancing, and modeling Federal Energy Regulatory Commission compliance standards.

Mr. Simonson has given technical presentations in regional policy and system reliability forums including the Energy Policy Institute’s (EPI) Annual Energy Policy Research Conference, WECC Compliance User Group, and many WECC Transmission Expansion Planning Policy Committee (TEPPC) stakeholder meetings. He also serves at the chair of the Douglas, Elbert, El Paso, and Pueblos Counties (DEEP) subcommittee which studies and promotes regional transmission system solutions for the load serving porting of that area.

I hope to see you on Thursday, November 12th at 5:30pm at the Leon Young Service Center located at 1521 S. Hancock Expressway, 80903.
I plan to have pizza and soda, so please register if you are planning to attend.