VALLEY FORGE, Pa. — PJM will discuss its updated capacity emergency transfer limits at next month’s meetings of the Market Implementation and Planning committees, staff said at last week’s PC meeting. The announcement came just days after Jorge Cardenas, vice president of asset management and centralized services for Public Service Electric and Gas, sent a letter to PJM’s Board of Managers voicing concern about the CETL values calculated for PJM’s eastern region.
Cardenas said the values were overstated, exposing PSE&G customers “to the risk of failing to meet the applicable generation adequacy standard under which PJM plans its system.” CETL values represent the amount of power that can be reliably imported to a locational deliverability area to meet its loss-of-load-expectation threshold. They also impact the Base Residual Auction, which begins tomorrow, so the RTO published the updated values on April 13.
PJM’s Mark Sims said the RTO has received substantial feedback on the CETL calculation methodology since the original numbers were posted in February, so the discussions will explain the RTO’s assumptions and how to “memorialize” them for future use.
Steve Herling, PJM vice president of planning, noted that some stakeholders have suggested using “slightly different” CETL values in the BRA versus the Regional Transmission Expansion Plan, which is why the RTO plans to discuss it at both the MIC and PC next month. He said he “expects” PSE&G’s concerns will be covered during the discussion.
John Farber of the Delaware Public Service Commission noted that PSE&G’s letter is substantially redacted and hard to understand.
“I think the philosophical elements need to be discussed regardless,” Herling said. “Some of the details that were redacted I don’t know will be necessary to everyone’s understanding of the issues.”
PSE&G’s letter suggests that PJM made “invalid assumptions regarding the operation of the controllable lines between PJM and NYISO,” specifically the phase angle regulators on the J/K lines at the Waldwick substation and the 5018 line at Ramapo. PSE&G said PJM’s assumption is “unreasonable” because it would prevent fulfillment of the RTO’s supply obligation to Rockland Electric on the 5018 line, which is part of PJM’s joint operating agreement with NYISO, and because the PARs must be changed individually. Since it would require adjusting PARs on the Waldwick, Ramapo, Goethals and Farragut lines, it couldn’t happen fast enough to address emergency situations, PSE&G said.
The letter also points out that the values assume NYISO will be able to produce certain results on its system, but that assumption might be unwarranted because the ISO will likely also be experiencing any weather-related emergencies that cause PJM to implement emergency actions.
Competitive Planning Process Manual Won’t Address Cost Containment
For PJM to codify its competitive planning processes in time for an upcoming RTEP window, as it hopes to accomplish with its proposed Manual 14F, the RTO won’t have time to address cost-containment provisions that stakeholders have repeatedly brought up. (See PJM Making Cost Consciousness a Focus for RTEP Redesign.)
“The discussion of cost capping is not going to be completed before we are asking for this endorsement of the manual,” Herling said. “Obviously, this is going to take a little bit longer. We have engaged two different consultants to help us, and we expect that there will be a lot of input from stakeholders, so for now, the coverage of the cost containment in the manual is going to be somewhat high-level. … We’ll amend the manuals as necessary, but we think it’s important to have the rest of the structure of the manuals and the process documented.”
Herling said PJM is “hoping” to have a two-month RTEP window running in the June-July timeframe.
PJM is holding an initial special session of the PC on cost capping and containment on May 24. It’s likely to cover education on types of cost containment that have been used in the industry, along with some financial analysis on how they could potentially be compared, PJM’s Sue Glatz said. Further meetings will be scheduled after that, she said.
The results of those discussions will have to be added into the manual later as amendments. PJM’s Mike Herman brought the manual for a first read last week and will be seeking endorsements at the PC and the Markets and Reliability Committee next month.
DEDS Task Force Ends at PC
Along with Manual 14F, PJM also hopes to secure approval for three designated entity design standard (DEDS) documents in time for the RTEP window. That process will likely be easier because, as Herman explained, the standards only require PC endorsement to become effective.
That unusual situation created concern for American Municipal Power representatives, who have previously questioned why PJM won’t require endorsement at the MRC.
Farber expressed concern about a designated entity agreement he had found filed at FERC that included a 3% rate escalation, which he felt went beyond the standards the Designated Entity Design Standards Task Force was developed to create.
“The designated entity agreement contains all terms and conditions, the requirements and obligations of a party who has been designed to construct a project, not just design standards,” Herling explained. “It’s far more reaching than that.”
The escalation was not pro forma and was unique to that specific project, PJM staff confirmed. The financial agreements were included, Herling said, as protection of the agreement.
“Our feeling was that those terms needed to be memorialized somewhere so that they would be to some degree at least enforceable,” he said. “People are bidding on a project with some form of cost containment. Obviously, we hope that they will then stand by that and we figured by putting it in an agreement that gets filed at FERC that there would be some teeth in it.”
Related to that topic are updates to Manual 14C that PJM is also presenting for endorsement, which focus coordination among entities constructing interconnection facilities. The negotiations could be long and laborious, but it could always be worse: AMP’s Ed Tatum asked what happens when the stakeholders can’t agree.
“We beat them with a stick,” Herling responded.
“But after that, Steve?” Tatum continued.
“We keep beating them with a stick.”
“What are the next steps?”
“It’s a bigger stick,” Herling said. “We’re confident of our ability to find a solution.”
Glatz reassured stakeholders that such measures are a last resort. “We have a long track record of coordinating with entities on both the transmission and on the generation interconnection side, and to my knowledge, we haven’t actually had to beat anybody with a stick yet.”
Tatum thanked them for the explanation and told Glatz he would relay a story about stick beating to her at another time.
“We appreciate you holding that one for later,” Herling said.
ISO-NE out of this ‘World,’ According to PJM Reserve Requirement Study
PJM has released for approval its assumptions for its 2017 reserve requirement study, and one thing PJM staff wanted to make clear is that ISO-NE has been completely removed from its calculations of the “World,” which consists of the four external systems with direct ties to PJM: NYISO, MISO, Tennessee Valley Authority and SERC Reliability’s VACAR region in Virginia and the Carolinas.
“Last year … we had New England inside of the World,” PJM’s Patricio Rocha-Garrido said. “Later on, when we ran load model selection analysis, we realized that if we keep New England in the World, then PJM and the World would be peaking on the same week, which was not consistent with what we were seeing from the historical perspective. Based on this, we introduced a change to the World load model, which switched the peaking week of the World load model.”
“I hope RTO Insider reports that PJM kicked ISO New England out of the World,” said Carl Johnson, who represents the PJM Industrial Customer Coalition.
Johnson then asked for PJM to perform a sensitivity study on what the results would be if it continued to use the commercial probability in its study. PJM doesn’t plan to adjust the megawatt rating of future generation by the commercial probability, as it has done in the past.
The assumptions will also correct what PJM sees as incorrect accounting in the past of behind-the-meter generation. No longer can BTM owners choose to be capacity resources. PJM’s Tom Falin said BTM will be reflected based on how it has impacted the metered load history over the past eight or nine years. That will be specified later this summer when the PC is asked to endorse a historical time period, he said.
“This language is just catching up to our current practice,” Falin said. “I would say the original language was wrong.”
Ramapo PAR Cost Allocation Forging New Territory
PJM’s current cost allocation construct is not applicable to the replacement of the Ramapo PARs because PJM’s JOA with NYISO points to the Northeast Protocol for most planning issues, and the protocol is an agreement that includes ISO-NE, PJM’s Chuck Liebold told the Transmission Expansion Advisory Committee last week. (See NYISO, PJM Discuss PARs’ Benefits, Cost Allocation.)
PJM is considering broadening the planning included in the JOA to include transmission facilities eligible for interregional and regional cost allocation. The current process uses an avoided-cost method, but PJM could use a solution-based distribution factor. Several other options are under consideration as well.
— Rory D. Sweeney