On March 18, 2010, FERC accepted Westar's interim proposal to charge for and provide generation regulation and frequency response services to generators located in Westar's balancing area whose output is delivered outside Westar's balancing area or to the SPP's energy imbalance market. Under the proposal, Westar will charge different generator regulation charges for dispatchable and intermittent generation until SPP's expected balancing area consolidation and ancillary services market are implemented. FERC found the proposal reasonable and consistent with cost causation principles in part because the evidence showed that intermittent generators' deviations from the deployment signal were more than three times greater than those of dispatchable generators. FERC declined to exempt Designated Resources that make occasional export transactions or sales into the SPP energy imbalance market from Westar's proposed charges. Finally, FERC conditioned its acceptance, among other things, on Westar using a portfolio-wide approach to compute the regulation requirements. FERC found that this approach appropriately shares the diversity benefits among generators and load, and does not inappropriately allocate costs to any one customer.

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