By Rory D. Sweeney

VALLEY FORGE, Pa. — After years of dragging the issue forward, Vitol’s Joe Wadsworth was about to see PJM stakeholders vote on schedule changes to accommodate spot-in sales between the RTO and NYISO.

But the scheduled vote at Wednesday’s Market Implementation Committee meeting was delayed after John Rohrbach of ACES said PJM’s simple solution for solving the problem would harm power sales in the South.

PJM had proposed delaying the spot-in request time by an hour to 10 a.m. across all seams, which would allow market participants looking to bring in power from NYISO the time to confirm they were approved by the ISO to export power. However, the delay causes issues along PJM’s southern border, Rohrbach argued.

Rohrbach said that the daily sales market in southern states begins early in the morning and is generally done by 10 a.m., so any power that doesn’t receive approval for PJM spot-in service wouldn’t have another market to be sold in. At 9 a.m., however, opportunities still exist to make bilateral trades, he said.

“Today, if you don’t get spot-in, you have other opportunities,” he said. “By 9, it’s already starting to tail off. … If you wanted to change the time to 8 a.m., we’d actually be happier with that.”

The South is a thinly traded market and the vertically integrated utilities there are comfortable with their schedule, Rohrbach said. They are “guaranteed” not to conform with PJM’s proposed changes, he added.

The news wasn’t bad for Wadsworth, who had originally proposed a more complicated, market-based solution and later suggested that the time change be limited just to the NYISO seam, which was opposed by the Independent Market Monitor. NYISO had also proposed a market-based solution that PJM stakeholders rejected. (See “Vitol Accepts Simplified Solution to Spot-In Issues,” PJM Market Implementation Committee Briefs.)

“We are happy to compete in a competitive marketplace. … I was very clear that I didn’t want to make a change that would impact others,” Wadsworth said. “This kind of creates the balloon effect — squeeze the balloon at one place and it’s going to pop out at another.”

PJM’s Chris Pacella said the issue with the market-based proposals are that they will require software upgrades, which would take time and resources. Stakeholders acknowledged the challenges but urged Pacella to see if the proposal could be accommodated using the current system.

“I know it’s not your preference, but you should at least look at adjusting [PJM’s software] to try the NYISO solution without hurting the other seams,” Direct Energy’s Jeff Whitehead said.

“I certainly feel for the folks who are trying to solve this,” said Carl Johnson of the PJM Public Power Coalition. “We took on the problems serially. We haven’t invested our best problem solving techniques. I don’t think we’ve given this our best effort.”

Throughout the spot-in discussion, the Market Monitor has insisted on maintaining consistent rules across all seams, which Monitor Joe Bowring highlighted ironically by quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson: “‘Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.’” He supported considering Rohrbach’s concerns and leaving the current rules in place in the interim.

Wadsworth agreed to remove his request for a vote on the proposal, but he asked stakeholders to help him revise the problem statement. Rohrbach immediately volunteered.