VALLEY FORGE, Pa. — Grid operators faced several high load forecasts and hot weather alerts last month but never had to take emergency procedures, PJM’s Chris Pilong told attendees at last week’s Operating Committee meeting.

Pilong reviewed five hot-weather alerts for the month, along with several that were called for early July, in his system operations report. On July 2, for example, the load forecast called for a roughly 152-GW peak, but several factors mitigated the actual demand to about 140 GW, he said, including showers in the RTO’s western region and the fact that date fell on a Monday going into a holiday.

“We were on track for 152 [GW]. Had we gotten there, we would have been OK, but that western rain did bring the loads down,” he said.

PJM’s Stephanie Monzon detailed the operations report for June, which included three spin events. David Mabry, who represents the PJM Industrial Customers Coalition, requested more detail on a June 4 event, caused by a trip loss of 1,210 MW from Unit 1 of the Braidwood nuclear plant. He said it seemed “unusual” the event was resolved in six minutes when the estimate for Tier 1 response was more than 1,000 MW higher than what actually responded. Monzon agreed to investigate and report back.

Real-time 30-minute Reserves

Stakeholders endorsed PJM’s proposal to create a real-time 30-minute reserve product along with a methodology for how to calculate a procurement objective for each year. PJM’s Vince Stefanowicz reviewed the proposal, which has remained consistent throughout the stakeholder process. (See “30-Minute Reserves Target Set,” PJM Operating Committee Briefs: May 1, 2018.)

Mabry urged staff to send the proposal to the Energy Price Formation Senior Task Force, which is focused on revisions to PJM’s energy market. He said working through it there would help him become more “comfortable” with the methodology and the justifications for the target procurement, which would be 3,784 MW for 2018.

While the proposal was endorsed with no objections, there were 48 abstentions that included Mabry’s coalition.

Black Start Fuel Assurance

PJM’s Glen Boyle outlined revisions to the issue charge for setting black start fuel requirements, which include pushing the anticipated start date for the stakeholder group back a month to September.

Staff also added “critical non-fuel consumables” to the list of requirements to develop and minimum tank suction level to compensation-related issues to hash out.

Load Shed Details

Pilong presented a detailed review of the May 29 load shed event in northwest Indiana. The event was short and the impact localized, but it was the first such event that might trigger the financial penalties implemented as part of Capacity Performance.

The incident analysis found that the Twin Branch-Jackson Road 138-kV line and the Jackson Road 345/138-kV transformer 3 tripped after the line contacted a tree around 12:30 p.m. Five other lines in the area were already offline for maintenance.

A contingency analysis found that if the South Bend-Twin Branch line or transformers at Twin Branch also went out, the Edison-Kankakee line might trip offline and potentially cause a cascading failure. To address this, PJM recalled two of the lines on planned outages and ordered the local utility, American Electric Power, to shed approximately 21 MW of load to relieve the Edison-Kankakee line.

About 15 minutes later, the transformer was restored to service, allowing PJM to end the load shed. The recalled lines didn’t come back online for at least another 90 minutes. The tripped line was back online slightly less than 12 hours after it tripped.

GT Power Group’s Dave Pratzon asked about a sixth line in the area that was also on a planned outage. Pilong said recalling it wouldn’t have relieved the situation because it’s on the western side of the Edison-Kankakee line and the issue was on power flowing from west to east, so it couldn’t have pushed power into the area.

“There were a lot of outages this day. That [one] didn’t have any impact,” Pilong said.

He said one of the lines had been on a planned outage since April 18, while the two lines that were recalled had started outages that day. Because the situation was resolved so quickly, operators never got the point of dispatching DR but might have if the situation had persisted, he said.

Regulation Update

PJM’s Eric Endress reviewed performance of the RTO’s regulation signal, which changed in January 2017. FERC has since rejected the compensation portion of PJM’s plan to revise its regulation market, but the signal has remained the same. (See FERC Postpones Tech Conference on PJM Regulation Market.)

Endress showed that the marginal benefits factor, which PJM has argued to use and FERC has repeatedly denied, has stayed fairly consistent since May 2017, ranging between 1.01 and 1.33 each month.

Combustion turbines have consistently been top performers in both the slower, sustained-output RegA signal and the faster, dynamic RegD signal. Hydro was also a top RegA performer, followed by demand response and steam. Storage was a top RegD performer, followed by DR and hydro.

RegD units were pegged for more than 30 minutes no more than four times in a given month, reaching that rate only in March 2017. The RegD signal is meant to peg unit response for short durations. RegA resources, which don’t have response limitations, were generally pegged more often and for longer periods.

Resilience

PJM’s Dean Manno announced that the RTO plans to substantially expand its procedures for addressing cyberattacks. The details came as part of a presentation on operational changes planned to increase system resilience, which include a procedure to freeze system changes and requiring transmission owners to inform PJM when they disable the auto-reclose feature on any transmission facilities.

The procedures will address responses to cyberattacks against PJM or its members, as well as the telecommunications network between them.

— Rory D. Sweeney