By Rich Heidorn Jr.
PJM’s Joint System Operations Subcommittee (SOS) will hold the first of its weekly meetings on how the COVID-19 coronavirus is impacting generation and transmission operators at 2 p.m. Thursday.
PJM’s Paul McGlynn announced plans for the meeting at last week’s Operating Committee meeting. (See “SOS to Meet Weekly on COVID-19 Impacts,” PJM Operating Committee Briefs: March 12, 2020.)
“I recognize that many of you are competitors in our markets … on a normal day-in-and-day-out basis,” McGlynn said Tuesday during a 30-minute conference call to prepare for Thursday’s session. “But our industry has a long tradition of working together to operate the grid reliably and … keep the lights on through some pretty challenging conditions. [The weekly calls are] to get us on the same page.”
The agenda for Thursday’s meeting includes discussions on PJM’s Pandemic Response Plan; transmission outage rescheduling; generation availability and maintenance outages; gas pipeline coordination; COVID-19 prevention best practices; and waivers that may be required due to impacts of the pandemic.
Senior Vice President of Operations Mike Bryson paraphrased testimony astronaut Frank Borman gave to Congress in a hearing on the Apollo 1 fire that killed three astronauts in 1967.
“The comment he made was, ‘The thing we were most guilty of is a failure of imagination,’” Bryson said. “The emphasis I really want to put on this is give us any of your ideas. … We need to be thinking outside the box.”
Stakeholders asked PJM to inform them of any contacts with state and federal officials and how the RTO would deal with minimum generation events caused by reduced loads from manufacturing shutdowns and office workers telecommuting.
“With the mild weather coming through right now and … this feeling almost like a weekend or a holiday, that is something we will keep looking at,” promised SOS Secretary Paul Dajewski.
Calpine’s David “Scarp” Scarpignato said generators may need “proactive action” from PJM if there are mandatory quarantines.
“If we’re unable to get our contractors there to do the major maintenance that has to occur in March and April, and you put it off … into June or July, then all the sudden you need this stuff done for the generators to perform during peak [demand], [and] you’re not going to have” sufficient generation, Scarp said. “It is really critical that our personnel and our contractors are considered essential personnel.”
PJM announced after the meeting that it was canceling the PJM System Operator Seminar scheduled in Columbus, Ohio, from March 31 to April 24.
Bryson said companies that have operators whose NERC or PJM certifications are at risk of lapsing should contact the RTO’s member training team. “We can try to work with you to try to get those [continuing education] hours,” he said. “Our first approach is to push the training to maintain certification. And then if we need to do something different, we’ll work with ReliabilityFirst and SERC [Reliability] and NERC to handle that.
“They will work with us,” he added.
