Members Committee

Executive Promotions

PJM announced the promotion of several executives during last week’s Members Committee meeting.

Nigeria Bloczynski, PJM’s chief risk officer, was named as a vice president to go along with her officer title. Her responsibilities include corporate insurance programs, credit risk, enterprise risk management, trade risk and analytics and trade surveillance.

Bloczynski first joined PJM in 2019 as its chief risk officer, carrying more than 20 years of experience in commodity and credit risk management in financial and energy markets. She holds a mathematics degree from Morgan State University and an MBA from Johns Hopkins University.

Asim Haque, PJM’s vice president for state and member services, will continues in that role but will also be a designated officer in the organization. He currently oversees state government policy, which includes both the state relations and state policy solutions functions, as well as member services, which includes stakeholder affairs, client management, knowledge management center, and state and member training departments.

Haque joined PJM in 2019 after serving as chairman of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. He has chemistry and political science degrees from Case Western Reserve University and a law degree from Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law.

Christopher O’Hara, general counsel for PJM, was named senior vice president, secretary and chief compliance officer. O’Hara oversees PJM’s compliance and reliability standards and law departments and is responsible for the RTO’s legal operations, including all of its regulatory, litigation and commercial needs. Before joining PJM in 2017, O’Hara had in-house and private law firm experience in the energy field. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania and his law degree from the University of Maryland School of Law.

Ricardo Rodriguez, PJM’s chief audit executive, was named senior director of internal audit. He oversees the RTO’s internal audit department and is a member of the executive team, reporting to CEO Manu Asthana and the Board of Managers’ Risk and Audit Committee. He has more than 20 years of experience in the energy, pharmaceutical and financial industries in the areas of finance, regulatory compliance, information security, operations and information systems. He holds a degree in business administration from the University of Puerto Rico and a master’s degree in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.

All four promotions take effect on March 10.

“I am pleased to recognize the accomplishments and work of these four leaders within the organization,” Asthana said. “Under their leadership, PJM has made great strides in all of their areas, and I expect that progress to continue.”

MC Resolution Changes not Endorsed

Stakeholders rejected four different proposals aimed at addressing resolutions coming from the MC.

Sharon Midgley of Exelon and Jim Davis of Dominion Energy reviewed the proposals, along with the associated Operating Agreement revisions, to develop new rules to ensure a sufficient number of stakeholders participate in the approval of an MC resolution. Midgley said the issue has been discussed for nearly a year at the Stakeholder Process Forum. The goal of the effort was to ensure that if a resolution is endorsed by the membership, it reflects the actual will of a majority of stakeholders, she said.

The issue first arose in January 2020, when stakeholders endorsed a resolution objecting to a tariff attachment before FERC that would create a new confidential process to mitigate critical infrastructure on NERC’s CIP-014 list.

Some stakeholders challenged the participation level of the resolution vote, with more than half of the members present at the meeting abstaining from the vote. Midgley said less than 3% of members supported the resolution, raising questions about whether the sector-weighted voting outcomes accurately reflected members’ perspectives on the issue. (See PJM Members Resist TO Critical Infrastructure Filing.)

Midgley said rules should be developed to address sufficient member approval of a resolution and whether sector-weighted voting is a sufficient tool to measure stakeholder consensus for resolutions. Midgley said the proposals suggested that there should be a minimum participation level to approve a resolution, pointing out that one voting member in the Electric Distributor sector was able to carry the entire sector in the January 2020 resolution vote.

One of the proposals, which called for the elimination of MC resolutions and instead encouraged stakeholders to submit letters to the board on an issue, failed with a sector-weighted vote of 1.19 (23.8%). The main motion, which called for a two-thirds sector-weighted vote and at least five members from each of the five sectors participating in a yes/no manner on a resolution vote, also failed with a sector-weighted vote of 1.11 (22.2%).

The two other proposals, Alternate 1 and Alternate 2, which had similar participation thresholds, also failed to be endorsed, each garnering a sector-weighted vote of 1.01 (20.2%).

Greg Poulos, executive director of the Consumer Advocates of the PJM States, was supposed to review an alternative proposal on behalf of the Delaware Division of the Public Advocate but pulled it from the agenda before being considered. Poulos said the advocates decided that “no change was the best course” on the issue and that they had a problem with attempting to create higher thresholds to pass resolutions.

Ed Tatum of American Municipal Power said he was “confused” by the procedure of allowing votes on four separate proposals brought at the same time by the same set of sponsors. Tatum said some of the proposals would have the unintended consequence of enabling “undue influence” by a member or group of members in that the minimum number of “yes” votes required in a sector could be used by stakeholders to block the consideration of MC resolutions through strategic non-voting methods.

The structure of PJM voting was never supposed to be based on “who has spent the most, who owns the most, nor who is the loudest,” Tatum said, and having five voting sectors puts stakeholders on a “somewhat level playing field” through the sector-weighted vote.

Paul Sotkiewicz of E-Cubed Policy Associates said MC resolutions have been used infrequently in PJM and that the resolutions have no force of law, do not require any action by the RTO and cannot be filed with FERC. He said members “wasted a lot of time” talking about an issue that carries no legal weight in the stakeholder process and that he doesn’t understand pursuing resolutions when members can already send letters to the board to voice opinions.

“For us to be playing around with this anymore is counterproductive,” Sotkiewicz said. “We have other venues we can express our common interests and also client interests.”

Endorsement of Stability Limits

Members endorsed proposed tariff and OA revisions related to stability limits in markets and operations with a sector-weighted vote of 3.95 (79%). The package was endorsed with a sector-weighted vote of 4.05 (81%) at last month’s Markets and Reliability Committee meeting. (See “Stability Limits Endorsed,” PJM MRC/MC Briefs: Jan. 27, 2021.)

The proposal aims to address the allocation of limits to multiple units by stating that the limit will apply to the sum of the output of the affected units plus ancillary service megawatts. Current rules require PJM to implement a thermal surrogate to reflect the stability constraint in the day-ahead and real-time markets and to bind the constraint, affecting the unit’s dispatch.

The package also includes a measure for transparency, with PJM posting data on the frequency, location and number of affected units while maintaining confidentiality rules.

Lost opportunity cost (LOC) credits would not be paid for any reduction required to honor the stability limit. Similarly, LOC would not be paid for economic megawatts of a resource that cannot produce because of a ramp limitation.

Sotkiewicz requested a sector-weighted vote be taken on the issue after it had initially been placed on the MC’s consent agenda for endorsement. He presented an alternate opportunity cost proposal, sponsored by J-POWER at the January MRC meeting, that was fundamentally the same as the endorsed proposal except for providing compensation for LOCs.

Sotkiewicz said J-POWER continued to object to the lack of payment for LOCs.

“We believe that the PJM proposal should be rejected and the OA language remain as it is to pay for lost opportunity costs for units being backed down for reliability,” Sotkiewicz said.

Consent Agenda

Stakeholders unanimously endorsed two issues on the consent agenda, including:

• Tariff Attachment K and OA Schedule 1 revisions addressing market rules for real-time values. The package was endorsed with a sector-weighted vote of 4.9 (98%) at the January MRC meeting. (See “Real-time Values Market Rules,” PJM MRC/MC Briefs: Jan. 27, 2021.)
• Tariff, OA and Reliability Assurance Agreement (RAA) revisions addressing the disposition of price-responsive demand credits. The package was unanimously endorsed by acclamation vote at the January MRC meeting. (See “PRD Credits Disposition,” PJM MRC/MC Briefs: Jan. 27, 2021.)

Markets and Reliability Committee

TLR Buy-through 1st Read

Chris Advena, senior lead engineer for PJM, reviewed revisions to remove the transmission loading relief (TLR) buy-through congestion process from the OA during a first read at the MRC meeting last week.

Advena said TLR buy-through is the tool PJM uses to curtail interchange transactions that are causing loop flow to the RTO around the time emergency procedures are being conducted to reduce the impact on a flowgate or a transmission facility. Advena said TLR is narrow in its scope and applies only to interchange transactions that aren’t physically in the PJM footprint.

TLR was created when PJM was fully within the Mid-Atlantic region and was issued more frequently than it is today, Advena said. It was also put in place prior to joint operating agreements and congestion management with MISO, NYISO and SPP. He said it has rarely been used despite existing for more than 20 years.

Advena said TLR also carries reliability considerations, including the need for manual implementation by operators that can slow down the curtailment process, and that it “doesn’t have value” for PJM or stakeholders.

PJM is using the “quick fix” process to remove the language from the OA, Advena said, and is seeking final approval at the MC’s meeting April 21.

“We’re going through the quick fix because this seems like it’s relatively not impactive and there aren’t any system changes required,” Advena said.