By Rory D. Sweeney

VALLEY FORGE, Pa. — PJM has made several changes to its proposed planning process for competitive transmission projects in response to stakeholder feedback, staff said Friday.

At a special Planning Committee meeting on redesigning the Regional Transmission Expansion Plan and the Transmission Expansion Advisory Committee, PJM’s Fran Barrett said the RTEP “is not just about [FERC] Order 1000.”

“The RTEP has been in service for 18 years. It’s served us well, but the market is changing,” Barrett explained. “We have heard you. [The redesign] is not just going to be about technology. It’s going to be about timing; it’s going to be about interactions.” (See PJM Proposal Would Lengthen Reliability RTEP Cycle.)

The changes would be detailed in a proposed Manual 14F. Among the changes is considering cost containment in the project selection phase, the details of which have not been finalized. “At this point, we have not made an effort to [separately] define ‘cost cap’ and ‘cost-containment mechanism,’” PJM’s Mike Herman said.

Alex Stern of Public Service Electric and Gas cautioned against creating a “race to the bottom” by selecting projects for having the lowest cost cap.

GT Power Group’s Dave Pratzon asked how the evaluation standards will be applied to what he called “squishy” situations, where the costs and benefits of a proposal might not be straightforward.

“How incidental a failure in PJM’s initial study does someone have to have before” the project is rejected? he asked.

Herman agreed that more consideration could be applied to the issue but said the manual can’t anticipate all possible situations. “I think we could get into lots of detailed discussions about ‘odd’ situations,” he said.

Proposed changes to the workflow diagram include:

• Removing supplemental projects as a criteria driver, a response to stakeholders who said such projects don’t fit with market efficiency projects and should have their own diagram;
• Including a footnote that explains how public-policy decisions factor into the public-policy criteria driver;
• Adding “evaluation of impacts on other projects” into PJM’s factors for consideration, with a focus on whether the proposal alleviates the need for a supplemental or previously approved baseline project; and
• Moving “stakeholder review” from the TEAC recommendation phase to one of the factors for consideration, to emphasize the importance of ongoing stakeholder feedback.

Stern reiterated his suggestion that the manual be limited to market efficiency projects.

“I’m not intending that we stop the discussions on reliability. In my mind, that’s going to take longer,” said Stern, who offered his own edits to the proposed manual.

“We thought there were a lot of similarities [between reliability and market efficiency projects] both on the front end and on the back end,” Herman said. “They still fall within the same decisional thinking process. … We felt it made most sense to put it all together in one manual.”

“We think it’s prudent to put the language together so you can see the differences,” Barrett added.

Other stakeholders agreed they preferred a single document. “That kind of leans me back toward ‘Let’s do this all together,’” PJM Public Power Coalition’s Carl Johnson said.

“Can I just say ‘what Carl said,’ or do I have to repeat it?” Calpine’s David “Scarp” Scarpignato said.

FirstEnergy’s John Syner also leaned toward a single manual, but he said incumbents should be given “brownie points” such as basis points for their longevity and reliability.

“I don’t know how you can put a manual together and be able to give all of those ‘brownie points,’” he said, adding that it likely will need to occur during transmission owner prequalification and would require a Tariff change.