VALLEY FORGE, Pa. — Members endorsed PJM’s 2016/17 winter weekly reserve targets, but not without first questioning if they could be reduced.

Part of PJM’s reserve requirement study, the winter targets are used by the Operations Department to coordinate generator maintenance outages in the cold months. (See “IRM Study Approved but Criticized for Lack of Winter Analysis,” PJM Markets and Reliability and Members Committees Briefs.)

Stakeholders asked why the winter loss-of-load expectation needs to be near zero given that few zones within PJM are winter peaking. PJM’s Patricio Rocha-Garrido explained to the Operating Committee that the annual LOLE target of 0.1 — one day every 10 years — is cumulative throughout the year, so maintaining a near-zero level in the winter provides more leeway in the summer when load is higher.

“If we were to allow for a large risk in the winter, we would need a lower risk in the summer, which would require a larger reserve margin,” Rocha-Garrido said.

The targets will leave PJM with between 24 and 30% of its available reserves between December and February.

PJM Considering Changes to System Operations Report

After walking through the operations report for October, staff outlined ideas for redesigning the report to address additional topics. Among the subjects being considered for inclusion are topology changes, weather trends and seasonal comparisons.

Stakeholders requested PJM increase its focus on reducing load-forecasting errors by providing more granularity about what factors are driving errors, such as how many and how often generating units are brought online in response to specific reliability contingencies. Staff said their ability to release information on specific units is limited because of the need to protect market-sensitive data.

“We’re talking about that internally,” PJM’s Joe Ciabattoni said.

Committee Endorsements and Recommendations

The OC made the following endorsements without objections or abstentions:

• The 2017 day-ahead scheduling reserve requirement, which will be incorporated into Manual 13.
• Updates to the TO/TOP matrix, an index between the PJM manuals and NERC reliability standards that specifies assigned and shared tasks for PJM and transmission owners. The changes, which the OC recommended be approved by the Transmission Owners Agreement-Administrative Committee, add new standards and delete inactive ones.

‘Cover to Cover’ Manual 13 Changes Better Reflect Reserve Requirements

PJM’s Chris Pilong presented a first read of extensive changes to Manual 13: Emergency Operations, on which the RTO will seek endorsement at the December committee meeting. Many of the changes are to clean up and streamline language regarding capacity and transmission emergency procedures.

“There are a lot of changes in here,” he said, but he acknowledged that many aren’t substantive. The biggest changes were the inclusion of more accurate Mid-Atlantic Dominion (MAD) reserve requirements. “The obligation can be met with non-MAD resources … if they’re deliverable,” he said.

Manual 14D Changes to Facilitate Periodic Surveys

PJM will be seeking endorsement at the December committee meeting on changes to Manual 14D: Generator Operational Requirements. The changes include the renaming of the section on fuel limitation reporting — now fuel and emissions reporting — a new section on periodic reporting and updates to the provisions on seasonal reporting. PJM’s Augustine Caven said the intention is to begin doing generating-unit surveys more often. “We definitely utilize [the survey] pretty heavily for operations purposes as we head into the winter,” he said.

Audit Goes Well

NERC and ReliabilityFirst Corp.’s planning and operations audit, which reviewed PJM’s compliance with 21 reliability standards and 48 requirements, concluded with no violations, two areas of concern and nine recommendations. There also were two open enforcement actions, PJM’s Srinivas Kappagantula said.

PJM is awaiting a draft audit report and will let stakeholders know about any changes it decides to make.

Kappagantula commended the transmission owners for their assistance in the process. “I wanted to think the TOs because we’ve reached out to you … for some of the data-sampling evidence that we requested,” he said. “That kind of reduced the onsite burden for us and the audit team … because they didn’t have to go through a bunch of documents onsite.”

OATF Study Finds No Major Concerns

While several major generation additions are coming online this winter, the Operations Assessment Task Force’s preparedness study found no significant concerns from its base case and N-1 analyses.

It found that off-cost generation redispatch and switching will be required to control local thermal or voltage violations in some areas. Networked transmission voltage violations were controlled by capacitors and all other voltage violations were caused by radial load, PJM officials said.

Stakeholders were concerned, however, that the study used hypothetical values in its calculations rather than real-world results.

Calpine’s David “Scarp” Scarpignato noted that units with dual-fuel capabilities weren’t differentiated from those without for pipeline failure contingencies. “This thing has a point to it, and I think you [should] set up the base case as accurate as possible,” he said.

– Rory D. Sweeney