Angie Bond Simpson

SRP is one of the nation's largest public power utilities.

We serve power and water to over 2.2 million people in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area.

My job is to do future infrastructure planning for the power system.

I am the senior director of resource management.

Yeah, that occurs with really good planning and different planning horizons.

So when we're talking about big infrastructure planning, that takes years.

So when my group looks at planning for what's needed in the future, we're thinking about maybe six to 30 years out.

Sure.

So they'll look at the next day and they'll say, based on the weather, based on how customers have used electricity over years of data, here is our best prediction for what tomorrow will look like.

What they do is they essentially stack the generation in a way to meet reliability and to do the best economics for the system.

So they're trying to solve for both reliability and economics.

That's correct.

But they're not always there.

Sometimes things happen, right?

Sometimes the wind doesn't blow.

Sometimes there are clouds.

And you want to do that as much as possible.

But your dispatchable resources are more like a faucet.

You want to be able to go to that faucet to turn it on.

And sometimes you need a large flow of water and sometimes you need just a trickle.