SPP (Southwest Power Pool)

SPP is known as wind country, and its queue is wind-dominated. But on the same signed, near-term merchant test, signed interconnection agreement and in service by 2028, SPP holds about 2.0 GW of firm gas, the second most of any US market after ERCOT and well ahead of PJM and MISO.

The signed, near-term gas is concentrated in Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle, with smaller positions in Nebraska and Colorado. SPP is largely a market of vertically integrated utilities, so like MISO the firm build leans on the utility rather than a deep merchant field, but the queue here does carry a cleaner signal than MISO's because SPP marks executed agreements explicitly.

For a data center willing to look past the marquee markets, the Plains pair cheap land with an existing gas fleet of about 33 GW, though water access varies by site. But the signed, near-term merchant queue is only about 2 GW, so a hyperscaler siting here is largely relying on utility relationships and the existing fleet, not new merchant build. It is a secondary option.

Winter reliability is worth weighing too. During Winter Storm Uri in February 2021, SPP directed controlled outages for the first time in its history, and cold-weather generator performance remains an active reliability focus for FERC and NERC.

See the full analysis in The Second-Largest Merchant Firm-Gas Queue Is in the Plains.