By Suzanne Herel

WILMINGTON, Del. — PJM members agreed last week to consider relaxing confidentiality rules, despite reservations from several utilities.

Current rules allow the release of sensitive data only if it includes information about at least three market participants and is no more specific than a PJM transmission zone. PJM also is prohibited from discussing confidential information that has been made public elsewhere.

PJM’s Tom Zadlo said the problem statement represented an effort to strike a “reasonable balance between transparency and confidentiality.”

For example, he said, the cold weather events during the 2014 polar vortex and the hot weather events from 2013 “both were instances where PJM was interested in releasing more data. We would not have been releasing data in a harmful way, but it was prevented.” (See PJM Considering Release of Uplift, Outage Data.)

Neal Fitch of NRG Energy questioned whether PJM was presenting a problem statement or presenting a solution.

“All problem statements, according to doctrine, are the question, not the answer,” Zadlo said. “But if you’ve got a pretty simple problem with a pretty simple solution, you can have a solution when you come forward. That’s why PJM took the unusual step of proposing a solution along with the problem statement.”

That said, stakeholders will be free to consider the areas as they see fit, he said.

They are:

• Making the list of generators that cleared in the Reliability Pricing Model available at the close of the auction instead of the start of the delivery year three years later. This potential change concerned stakeholders from Exelon and Dominion Resources, who said the knowledge that a generator did not clear an auction could lead to concern about the future of generators that fail to clear, threatening to disrupt relations with labor unions and vendors.
• Demand response supply in small areas. “We’re not talking about dollars. We’re not talking about providers,” Zadlo said. “We’d just like to be able to [talk about] demand response in an area smaller than a transmission zone.”
• Information about concluded generator outages. This would not include planned or maintenance outages. “PJM is not interested in systemic disclosure,” he said.
• Confidential data that has been made public elsewhere. Currently, Zadlo said, “Even if everyone in the world knows about it, we can’t talk about it.”
• Data regarding uplift, in order to encourage informed decision-making.
• To the initial list of five categories, Market Monitor Joe Bowring added for consideration the idea of publishing summary results of the Three Pivotal Supplier test, a measure of market power.

Susan Bruce, representing the PJM Industrial Customer Coalition, recommended that some degree of “symmetry” be used as a guideline in addressing each of the areas in order not to unfairly expose one part of the market. For example, she said, “If there is some sort of pullback on some of those areas [such as generator information] and DR moves forward, that would give us concerns over comparable treatment.”