PJM will hold the 2022/23 Base Residual Auction in May after being delayed since 2019 over FERC’s expansion of the minimum offer price rule (MOPR).

The auction will take place from May 19-25 PJM said, and it will post the BRA results on June 2.

Pete Langbein of PJM presented the updated schedule for the 2022/2023 BRA and future auctions at last week’s Markets and Reliability Committee meeting. Langbein said PJM determined the implementation of auction dates was appropriate after FERC’s Nov. 12 order on the forward-looking energy and ancillary services (E&AS) offset calculation (EL19-58-002). (See FERC Approves PJM Key Capacity Market Variable.)

Langbein said the order on E&AS offset was the final piece to establish the timeline for the BRA and all the associated activities leading up to the auction.

“We received a relatively clean forward-looking energy and ancillary services offset order,” Langbein said. “We feel confident that we can move forward with the actual BRA.”

FERC’s order required PJM to make a compliance filing within 15 days to use the average equivalent ability factor of all the nuclear resources in the RTO to represent a projected refueling outage. Several stakeholders had argued that using individual anticipated refueling schedules when determining nuclear resources’ availability was inadequate.

Langbein said the commission provided PJM the red line Tariff language necessary to make the filing.

PJM has been working on a compressed BRA schedule since February when the RTO began sketching out its response to FERC’s order expanding the MOPR. (See PJM May Compress BRA Schedule over MOPR.)

Since the BRA is scheduled to take place soon, Langbein said PJM had to cancel the first and second incremental auctions for both the 2022/23 and the 2023/24 delivery years. The 2023/24 BRA is scheduled to take place December 2021.

PJM also proposed canceling the first incremental auction for the 2024/25 delivery year in June 2022.

The incremental auction changes are based on the compressed BRA schedule, Langbein said, and PJM determined that a scheduled incremental auction will be canceled if its normally scheduled date has passed. PJM will also cancel a scheduled incremental auction if it falls within 10 months of the BRA for that delivery year, Langbein said. He continued that PJM will always conduct a third incremental auction.

PJM will use the January 2021 load forecast for the 2022/23 BRA and the most up-to-date load forecast in future BRAs, Langbein said.

“Our focus has really been on making sure we have all the dates established for the upcoming BRA, but we wanted to get out the subsequent BRA schedules as well,” he said.

The future BRA dates are January 2023 for the 2025/26 delivery year; July 2023 (2026/27) and May 2024 (2027/28).

PJM plans on conducting the BRA six months after the results are posted from the prior BRA, Langbein said, before returning to its normal auction schedule for the 2027/28 delivery year.

Langbein said some of the key pre-auction BRA dates for the 2022/23 delivery year include requests of winter capacity interconnection rights (CIRs) on Jan. 4 and the first-time fixed resource requirement (FRR) election on Jan. 18. Several activities will take place Jan. 19, he continued, including the generation state subsidy certification and the resource specific MOPR exception requests.

“We realize things are going to be a little tight with all the additional activities that normally go on prior to the start of the delivery year,” Langbein said. “But it’s the schedule we’ve come up with based on the timeline we have out there.”