By Rory D. Sweeney
VALLEY FORGE, Pa. — PJM staff last week outlined a proposal to lengthen the RTO’s Regional Transmission Expansion Plan cycle for reliability projects from 12 months to 18 months.
Staff explained the plan at a special session of the Planning Committee on redesigning the Transmission Expansion Advisory Committee.
The proposal comes in response to more detailed analysis of the optimal timing for the planning cycle, a component of the TEAC redesign that began about a year ago, staff said.
The expansion of the cycle — along with the development of a flowchart for how projects will move through proposal windows — would represent a “memorialization” of existing processes that have never been specifically defined, PJM’s Mike Herman said.
The proposed change would take effect for the 2018 planning year, moving the beginning of the cycle to September 2017. The RTEP cycle for market efficiency projects would remain unchanged.
Stakeholders expressed concern about the decisional-process flowchart and asked for additional transparency around why certain projects are rejected. They also sought more opportunities to provide input.
Staff acknowledged some of the concerns but pushed back on others.
Paul McGlynn, PJM senior director of planning, said it would be challenging to rank projects against each other because of the difficulty in comparing the relative benefits of dissimilar project factors.
Vice President of Planning Steve Herling provided a hypothetical example of the challenge: “There’s no way to show how much a perceived benefit is going to wipe away the ability to get a right of way through the Gettysburg Battlefield.”
Alex Stern of Public Service Electric and Gas questioned the wisdom of trying to incorporate all project drivers into a single comprehensive manual and warned that critical pieces might get “lost in the sauce.”
PJM staff acknowledged his concerns. “Ultimately, I’m less concerned about the format of the manuals than about the content,” Herling said.
Stern also suggested that PJM include a provision to limit the potential for selling a project before or after it’s built, which attorney Steve Huntoon warned might create “unintended consequences that raise risk.”
The next meeting on the issue is scheduled for Feb. 10.