SIPC has always followed a more traditional utility planning philosophy to meet the needs and requests of our members, but other supply options have been evaluated in the past and were found not to be in the best interest of our member/owners.   With traditional utility planning, planners take into consideration the demand to be met, the reliability to be achieved, and applicable government policies and regulations. The planner then selects the types of fuels, power plants, transmission systems, and power purchases that will meet these objectives with the minimum revenue requirement (the revenue that must be collected to finance and operate the power system).  Options have generally been selected from the supply side (options to supply power) perspective because of the difficulty of creating an fair and equal member process for demand side options (reducing electricity demand) on the electrical system.

Integrated resource planning (IRP) is a planning process for electric utilities that evaluates many different options for meeting future electricity demands and selects the optimal mix of resources that minimizes the cost of electricity supply while meeting reliability needs and other objectives.  SIPC has made it a primary objective to focus on being a low cost provider while maintaining a reliable power system.   Since SIPC is located in the Illinois Basin coal region the low cost fuel choice has been coal which lead to the decision of building the CFB boiler and participating in the Prairie State generation project.

SIPC joined the Midwest ISO (MISO) and became a participant in the Day 2 Energy Market as well as the Ancillary Services Market (ASM).  This allows the SIPC generation to be economically priced in the market and in periods of low cost market supply the SIPC generation can be operated at a minimum generation level to take advantage of lower priced purchases.

SIPC has an established off peak and interruptible rates to offer commercial customers for managing on-peak demands.  DSM has been evaluated in the past and was dismissed when the program did not provide an equal benefit to all members.  SIPC is currently in the process of re-evaluating DSM because of the changes made in the MISO ASM that may allow market benefits for providing DSM.

SIPC is a member of SERC and MISO.  As members of these organizations SIPC participates in several planning study groups.   MISO continually studies the transmission grid to identify congestion areas which need improvement.  The MISO transmission expansion planning group (MTEP) studies alternatives to eliminating the congestion areas and then creates a transmission improvement list of projects that need to be completed.  This is given to the respective transmission owners to implement into their own construction process.  Transmission Expansion tariffs have been submitted and were approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to help fund these needed transmission projects.

SIPC also participates in extensive planning studies with the members of SERC for load forecasting and capacity requirements that cover the complete SERC footprint.  These studies are an extension of the in-house studies that SIPC performs to meet NERC standards and to evaluate the required expansions or upgrades necessary to maintain reliability and minimize system losses on our existing transmission system.  These studies are the building block for the SIPC Construction Work Plan that is submitted and approved by the Rural Utility Service (RUS).

Another integral part of resource planning is maintaining the current generation resources.  SIPC has strived to maintain their generation assets to a level that maintains the original purchased specifications.  This allows the continued efficiency benefits that were received at the time the asset was put into service.

SIPC currently has the data for their generation assets, but is not currently provided the information for the MISO market purchases.  SIPC has two coal units, two gas combustion CTs and is a recipient of 28MW capacity and 42,000 MWhs of hydro energy from Southeastern Power Administration (SEPA). 

Currently SIPC has no regulated carbon emissions.

MISO does provide information about the generation by fuel type in a monthly report.  This data is provided below for March 2009:

Real time pricing is currently not available from the MISO.  It may be possible in the future to receive the real time pricing from MISO, but then SIPC will need to transmit that information to the Members.