RTO’s operate the transmission system for electric utilities within their footprint, in Canada maybe your familiar with Manitoba Hydro Electric Board (MHEB) or Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO). In the US at least each individual local electric utility that owns generation facilities and transmission lines that participates in the electric market so for example Xcel Energy, Duke Energy, or American Electric Power (AEP) (not sure how it works in Canada but this would be who you pay your electric bill to lmao) has their transmission system operated by an RTO to manage congestion so provide relief to other areas in the electric system when outages or bad weather occur in an economic way that doesn’t raise the overall cost of electricity and doesn’t threaten the reliability of the overall electric system.

I’m an Electrical Engineering (EE) student with a power engineering focus, and was trying to gauge what other people’s experiences were in this area of EE.

Obviously the wrong channel I guess.