The zone analyses discussions presented in this Assessment provide a list of reinforcements that are beginning to optimize our reinforcement plans, at least at the one- or maybe two-zone level. Three important questions regarding this plan include the following:

• How do the reinforcements for all the zones perform together?
• Does applying a solution in one zone create a problem that was not seen before in another zone?
• Are some zone solutions redundant when all the solutions are applied to the system?

This year we have taken another step to more adequately address the first two questions. We have built year 2011 and year 2015 models that include reinforcements reflecting our best thoughts on all of the most likely planned, proposed, and provisional projects to deal with the identified issues. First contingency analysis was performed on these two new models, including selected outages on neighboring systems. This analysis showed that the reinforcements in total did indeed deal with the issues identified and did not create any new issues to be resolved.

We recognize that we need to continue to develop our reinforcement optimization processes. The analyses described are not the only methods we use to optimize our plans and do not begin to address the third question. Also, access-driven reinforcements were not included in this analysis as we await more definition of the most likely projects. However, our project development process, including development of the access projects, does look to optimize the projects that are finally built.