WILMINGTON, Del. — Stakeholders remain reticent to cede too much command and control to PJM, voting at last week’s Markets and Reliability Committee meeting to defer a vote on revisions to Manual 14D because they felt the requirements for generation owners to submit ownership-transfer information were too strict.

GT Power Group’s Dave Pratzon said the changes could make it impossible for generators to meet PJM’s deadlines. (See “Owner Transfer Rules Revision,” PJM Operating Committee Briefs: Dec. 12, 2017.)

“The problem the generator owners have when they’re negotiating these deals is primarily timing. The timing set forth by PJM is not necessarily viable,” he said. “Certain information PJM needs may not have been negotiated in time to meet PJM’s deadline.”

Deals often need to be more fluid than PJM’s deadlines allow. “We feel the manual also needs to recognize commercial realities,” he said. He said one of his clients supplied him with a “page-long list” of issues and asked for more time to negotiate language changes before an endorsement vote.

PJM staff said there is a clause that allows staff to waive the requirements for more flexibility, but that the final five-day deadline can’t be adjusted.

“For those five days, we need to be sure that we have our units where they need to be in our system,” PJM’s Rebecca Stadelmeyer said.

However, Pratzon was not alone.

“We have similar concerns about the commercial reality,” EDP Renewables’ John Brodbeck said.

“The way it’s written right now, it looks like if [PJM doesn’t] feel like it, you won’t have to [provide the waiver],” Calpine’s David “Scarp” Scarpignato said.

Members subsequently agreed by acclamation to defer the vote. It will go back to the Operating Committee for reconsideration.

Overlapping Congestion

Members also deferred endorsement of a joint plant from PJM and MISO to address overlapping congestion charges for pseudo-tied resources. The decision came after PJM’s Tim Horger confirmed that consideration of the proposed Tariff and Operating Agreement (OA) changes could wait until next month’s meeting and still meet staff’s timeline.

“Ideally, we would file by the end of March,” Horger said.

PJM and MISO have been working to remove repetitive congestion charges and have developed a two-phase plan to eliminate them. These changes encompass the second phase. (See MISO, PJM Pursue Pseudo-Tie Double-Charge Relief.)

Carl Johnson, who represents the PJM Public Power Coalition, asked for clarification on a concern that certain market-to-market payments could simply be canceled under the rule. Horger said the payments are automatically created based on the pseudo-ties in the system and that he wasn’t aware of any concerns on that issue.

Johnson said he would research the topic further, and American Municipal Power’s Steve Lieberman asked if the endorsement vote could be delayed to address the question. To make the requested timeline, stakeholders must vote on the changes at both the MRC and Members Committee meetings next month.

OVEC Integration Set

Staff announced that the Ohio Valley Electric Corp.’s Board of Directors voted to change its date for integration into PJM from March 1 to June 1. (See FERC OKs OVEC Move to PJM.)

Staff also announced later in the day the cancellation of proposed transitional auction revenue rights for OVEC’s two coal-fired power plants. OVEC’s integration adds 705 miles of 345-kV transmission lines and 2,200 MW of capacity to PJM’s footprint.

Advocates Push Beyond FERC Order

Staff and transmission owners disagreed with customer representatives on how much change FERC recently ordered to PJM’s process for supplemental transmission projects. (See FERC Orders New Rules for Supplemental Tx Projects in PJM.)

PJM’s Steve Herling said the commission’s instructions call for more detailed delineation of how stakeholders can engage as TOs develop their supplemental projects.

“The bottom line is there’s a very short clock on the compliance filing,” he said, but the orders “seem to be relatively straightforward.”

Greg Poulos, executive director of the Consumer Advocates of the PJM States, said the order’s language “really raised a lot of alarms for me” and appeared to demand much more drastic changes.

“I’m reading this as FERC saying we’re going to tell you what to do because you’re not going in the right direction,” he said. “I was really hoping to see PJM do more than just the minimal amount that FERC orders transmission owners to do going forward.”

“Most of my read of the order was just to be more clear about” details and expanding access by adding more meetings, Herling said. “That’s the part that I think is going to be really straightforward to implement.”

“My reading of that is that the process has failed. And I don’t know that putting some more meetings in there addresses that,” Poulos responded.

Stakeholders agreed to further discuss the order’s implications at next month’s Planning Committee meeting.

Stakeholders Approve Variety of Actions

Stakeholders endorsed by acclamation several manual revisions and other operational changes:

• Manual 2: Transmission Service Request. Revisions developed in conjunction with revisions endorsed at last month’s meeting to amend the process for analyzing transmission service requests. The changes come after a FERC judge criticized PJM’s current procedures. (See FERC Judge Faults PJM, TOs on Transmission Upgrade Process.)
• Manual 11: Energy & Ancillary Services. Clarifies the energy offer verification process for demand-side bids, including caps on price-sensitive demand bids and eliminating certain restrictions on bids from curtailment service providers for pre-emergency and emergency demand response.
• Manual 18: PJM Capacity Market. Revisions developed to adhere to a FERC compliance filing on rules for pseudo-tie requirements and a transition period for existing pseudo-ties.
• A draft charter for the Summer-Only Demand Response Senior Task Force. The task force, which was developed to consider ways to take advantage of excess summer-only resources, has met several times. (See Stakeholders Seek Load Discussion in PJM DR Task Force.)
• Members agreed to sunset the Underperformance Risk Management Senior Task Force (URMSTF) and the Regulation Market Issues Senior Task Force (RMISTF). The URMSTF developed proposals on underperformance risk management, which failed to receive MRC stakeholder endorsement, and changes to external Capacity Performance requirements, which was endorsed. The RMISTF resulted in implementation of a new regulation signal, along with a package of regulation procedure and requirement changes. (See PJM Regulation Compensation Changes Cleared over Opposition.)

— Rory D. Sweeney