Powerstack: Bonneville names its price for a unified West

Speed to power is the whole game right now, and powered land is one of the fastest routes to it. Earlier today we published our Ohio powered land dataset. Our screen caught every data center being built on a disused power or industrial site, and 35 more sites nobody has claimed yet.

Think of it as a call sheet for your BD team. Currence clients, go get it here. 

Also, looking forward to seeing so many of you at our flagship event, Future Currence on 21 September in NYC! Or if you’re in Houston for GRC on 22 September, join us for our Currence Geothermal Breakfast!

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What happened

Bonneville's new administrator and CEO, Travis Kavulla, wrote a letter on 3 September that reopened the question of which day-ahead market the agency will join. His predecessor picked one last year, as a nonbinding policy direction. Bonneville sells close to 30% of the Northwest's power, enough that its answer sets whether the West trades inside one market or has a seam down the middle of it. The letter is dense in both style and substance, so grab a seat.

Most of the Northwest's grid runs through this one federal agency. Bonneville operates 15,000 circuit miles of high-voltage transmission, roughly three-quarters of the region's total, across Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and parts of Montana, California, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming.  More than 400 utilities, co-ops, and traders buy transmission on that system, most of them moving power across the region rather than into it. Bonneville also sells the output of 31 federal dams (run by the Army Corps and the Bureau of Reclamation), and operates its own balancing authority.

Balancing authorities can elect to join a day-ahead market, and Bonneville has been weighing this since 2023. A day-ahead market takes everyone's generation and expected demand for tomorrow and lets one operator dispatch the cheapest combination across the whole footprint, using the transmission members put into it. Until this year the West outside California had no organized day-ahead market, one of only two US regions in that position (alongside the Southeast).

Two have recently emerged. The first is the Extended Day-Ahead Market, or EDAM, run by California's grid operator, CAISO. Rather than build something new, CAISO opened up what it already runs to utilities outside the state: i) its own day-ahead market, and ii) the real-time Western Energy Imbalance Market that most of the West, Bonneville included, already trades in. FERC approved the design for EDAM in December 2023. PacifiCorp, a neighboring utility that runs its own balancing authority, started trading in EDAM on 1 May, and Portland General will join next, then the Balancing Authority of Northern California and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in 2027.

The other is called Markets+, which SPP, the grid operator for much of the middle of the country, is launching in October 2027. It's built for Western utilities that want a day-ahead market without joining SPP outright, so it runs on its own tariff, approved by FERC in January 2025, and participants keep their own balancing authorities.

Bonneville's own modeling showed being part of Markets+ could deliver lower costs on the load side, but that it would earn more for its power in EDAM, because a bigger footprint including California means higher prices for the surplus hydro Bonneville sells. The EDAM upside would vary more, though, since it rides on how much water comes down the Columbia and what California pays in the evenings, when solar drops off and hydro is worth most.

Bonneville's last administrator, John Hairston, chose Markets+ anyway, in May 2025, because of governance concerns about EDAM. Originally, EDAM sat inside CAISO, meaning market governance ran through California's institutions (and, Hairston worried, California's politics).

The rules changed after that. In July 2025 the Western Energy Markets Governing Body took primary authority over market rules and won its own filing rights at FERC. In September, Calif. Gov. Newsom signed AB 825, letting CAISO and California's utilities take part in a market, run by an independent organization. That was incorporated as the Regional Organization for Western Energy (ROWE) in December, and market authority can transfer to it as soon as January 2028. As Kavulla put it, ROWE and the California legislation were still theoretical when Bonneville first adopted its Day-Ahead Market Policy. 

Then the seams. Bonneville transmission configured into Markets+ would in many places overlay the retail territory of utilities heading into EDAM, and elsewhere the reverse, with Bonneville supplying power across other utilities' systems (see the map above). Where participants in two markets hold rights on the same paths, keeping service inside system operating limits could force Bonneville to withdraw transmission capacity from market optimization, which Kavulla called antithetical to the point of having a market.

And on depth he cited EIA data: 39GW of average net generation and 48GW of average demand in EDAM, against 19GW and 19GW in Markets+, both excluding Bonneville's own balancing authority. Volume gives a market the foundation for efficiency, Kavulla argued, though it doesn’t guarantee it. 

So there's a big decision to make. Continue toward Markets+, pivot to EDAM, stay status quo with no day-ahead market, or find another approach. Kavulla says he'll decide by year-end, and he has demands first: independent governance, and CAISO working as a contractor that ROWE supervises rather than a rule-maker. ROWE's board has yet to be seated.

The market Bonneville picks decides how much of the West dispatches as one system. Bonneville might not get the answers it wants, before committing. Resource adequacy, congestion revenue on the interties, and how its hydro gets priced all get settled in tariff filings running from late 2027 to mid-2028. The governance it's demanding gets settled this fall. Everything with money attached comes later, on trust.

Mark's take

I don’t know if you follow Travis Kavulla on LinkedIn. If you don’t, you should – he’s a good follow. My favorite of his recent posts was about his experience with Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. But today, per the above, we’re talking about his 3 September letter. 

I read it on my commute. As I was reading it, my reaction was oh, he’s already decided.

Now I don’t know if that’s the right answer, but it’s the impression I got. In the letter, he writes a couple things that seem to hint which way he’s leaning:

He seems to like EDAM, but with the features of Markets+. So what’s left are his terms. What would sway him. The key seems to be CAISO.

Four of his five terms are about governance. About how sectors will vote as blocs, how filing will be done outside CAISO, how the governance will not be tied to the California state government, and how CAISO will play the role of market services vendor. If Kavulla chooses EDAM, it looks like a win for California. But, if he gets his terms and goes with EDAM, it’s really a win for a more unified market and governance.

To me, a choice to go with EDAM would mean at least one interesting bonus implication. One market would also mean the current mountain-west clean firm build and the Northwest federal hydro fleet clear against each other rather than stopping at a seam. So this would mean Fervo's new 396MW PPA with Google, but also the feverish activity in the Currence Geothermal Lease Tracker, and even the 1GW EGS Ormat intends to build by 2035. It’s all in there, and in EDAM, all this new clean firm would compete with all the hydro in the Columbia, potentially creating a better, more competitive market for consumers.

Who this helps

PacifiCorp and Portland General. EDAM right now is PacifiCorp plus California, with no federal hydro in it (yet). Bonneville's dams could help cover the evening ramp to firm power and the transmission could help get it there.

ROWE's incoming board. It has no chair and no CEO yet, and Kavulla is giving it a lot more leverage. He’s fighting for things the board would have had to fight for itself.

Anyone trading across the Northwest border. One market instead of two means no hedging the seam and no scheduling the same power twice, a boost for Powerex and Western marketers.

Who should be nervous

CAISO. It’s looking at separate leadership for the market job and the balancing authority job, no special access to market information, staff kept out of policy work, headquarters outside California, and exit fees if the state tries to interfere.

SPP. Markets+ is being built for October 2027 with Bonneville as its biggest participant. Without the federal hydro, everyone else is paying for a smaller market than the one they signed up for, like Arizona Public Service, Tucson Electric, UniSource, Salt River Project, and Tacoma Power.

A quick read on the numbers shaping the market. The capex, the contracts, the regs, all anchored in the so-what.

$3bn // Crusoe reportedly raised more than $3bn at a roughly $30bn valuation, co-led by Atreides Management and Valor Equity Partners with Mubadala Capital participating. That's 3x the $10bn mark set in last October's $1.38bn Series E, and it lands alongside a reported $13bn, five-year cloud contract with Jane Street. Crusoe is now apparently weighing an IPO, joining the queue of data center developers and value chain players preparing to go public. 

$1.45bn // Vertiv is buying UtilityInnovation Group, a microgrid controls and behind-the-meter power architecture firm, with up to $1.15bn more in earn-outs. It extends Vertiv from the rack back to the utility interconnect, six months after its Bring Your Own Power & Cooling tie-up with Generate Capital. Power and cooling OEMs are buying their way into speed-to-power.

123GW // MISO's highest-ever September peak, served 2 September as an early-month heat dome briefly pushed the entire footprint into emergency procedures. It’s within 4GW of MISO's all-time record, set in July 2011. September used to be shoulder season, but data center and industrial load are compounding seasonal demand to hit new peaks.

19GW // Consumers Energy's new solar, wind, and battery storage plan through 2040. The 20-year supply plan takes nameplate capacity from 14.1GW in 2028 to 33.8GW. It pairs that build with two new gas plants as a hedge against load growth uncertainty. A renewables-forward utility adding gas into its base case could mean a capex wave headed for Michigan's rate base.

$1.9bn // DOE's loan to restart the 615MW Duane Arnold Energy Center in Iowa, closed 8 September through the Office of Energy Dominance Financing and underwritten by a 25-year Google PPA for the plant's full output. NextEra is targeting Q1 2029, pending NRC licensing, and is buying out the 30% held by two Iowa co-ops to take full ownership. It's the third restart the office has financed.

Explore more Signals on Currence here.

The policies, rulings, and company moves worth watching.

PJM weighing Ohio's State Agreement Approach (SAA) request at TEAC. PUCO's June 15 letter, which surfaced at the 8 September committee briefing, asks PJM to use the SAA mechanism built for New Jersey offshore wind to fast-track $4.2bn of high-voltage transmission to the 10GW PORTS-Pike campus. The SAA lets Ohio sponsor lines PJM wouldn't otherwise build, with the cost assigned to Ohio ratepayers rather than spread across the region.

California's data center tariff bills landing on Newsom's desk. California's SB 886 and AB 2383, now on Newsom's desk, would make new 75 MW-plus data centers pay their own way on the grid by forcing the CPUC to create a separate rate class covering their transmission upgrades and generation procurement. Newsom has until the end of September to sign or veto.

ERCOT missing its Batch Zero classification deadline twice. The PUCT granted good-cause exceptions on Aug. 20 pushing classifications to Aug. 31, and ERCOT missed that date too without saying how many projects are affected. Energization stays paused for data centers and crypto until the audit reports in December.

The latest research, features, and data drops on the Currence platform.

Ohio's next 35 powered-land sites. Currence Data Centers & Power Analyst, Charlie Little, screened 1,558 disused power and industrial sites across Ohio on land use, load size, grid proximity, and moratorium exposure. The filter caught all eight sites already being converted into data centers, surfaced 35 that nobody has moved on yet, and flagged 11 more that clear every other test but sit inside active moratorium boundaries. Read the analysis and download the site data here.

Where the market is meeting, and where to find us

📅 Future Currence // New York, 21 September // Currence’s flagship New York Climate Week event brings the leading utilities, hyperscalers, developers, financiers, and innovators into one room to build a vision for how the AI buildout can create a better grid future. Attendance subject to approval.

📅 Currence Geothermal Breakfast // Houston, 22 September // We're hosting a breakfast September 22nd during Geothermal Rising's 2026 conference to dive into the state of commercialization of advanced geothermal. Register here.

📅 Yotta 2026 // Las Vegas, 28-30 September // Network and learn at the biggest AI infrastructure conference of the year. With 6,000+ leaders across data centers, energy, compute, and capital, the conference is bringing industry leaders together to solve the cross-stack challenge of sustainable, scalable growth in the age of AI. Use code CURRENCE20 for 20% off passes

New easter egg for those who made it this far – the B-side! This week, it’s California Stars, Billy Bragg and Wilco. The lyrics are by Woody Guthrie, who in 1941 was actually on BPA's payroll writing songs about the Columbia dams. Bonneville's New Deal songwriter, singing about California. Awesome.

Full Powerstack B-Sides on Spotify.

Interested in diving deeper? Talk to our team and learn how the teams that finance and build the energy system use Currence to stay ahead in the energy and AI buildout, including Southern Company, Tokyo Gas, Jefferies, Galvanize, B Capital, and others.