By Rory D. Sweeney
PJM’s announcement on Thursday of plans to recommend more than $400 million in transmission upgrades — just weeks after the RTO’s Board of Managers authorized $1 billion in spending — sparked pushback from American Municipal Power, which said the RTO ignored questions about the effectiveness of several of the projects.
Staff plan to recommend adding the projects to PJM’s Regional Transmission Expansion Plan at the board’s Dec. 4 meeting.
AMP’s Ryan Dolan questioned PJM’s analysis of several of the reliability projects, arguing that the proposed solutions fail to address all issues at the nodes in question and will necessitate additional construction in the future. He was displeased that PJM plans to recommend the projects even though, he said, concerns were raised about their effectiveness from a “holistic planning” perspective at a sub-regional RTEP discussion the previous day.
“For some of these projects, basically … [PJM is] planning on making these recommendations no matter what comments were provided,” Dolan said. “I think it would be useful to give time between when we make recommendations to when the last review of a project is to ensure any of the comments … that were brought up … can actually be accounted for.”
PJM’s Mark Sims responded that all information underlying the RTO’s recommendation has been available throughout the planning process and that recommendations can change as additional information is added to the analysis.
“We’ve been transparent with all the steps along the way,” he said.
The $400 million in additional projects will be recommended as the result of a reliability analysis for the 2021/22 delivery year, Sims said. They include eight projects from the first RTEP proposal window for 2017, along with 13 projects that were previously identified.
The recommendations also include one market efficiency project proposed by American Electric Power to address a thermal constraint on the Tanners Creek-Dearborn 345-kV circuit. PJM’s Nick Dumitriu explained that AEP’s $600,000 solution would upgrade equipment at the Tanners Creek station, removing price separation in the Duke Energy Ohio/Kentucky (DEOK) locational deliverability area in the 2020/21 Base Residual Auction Capacity Emergency Transfer Limit (CETL) study.
PJM rejected two other proposals for the same constraint that estimated costs at $4.9 million and $12.7 million.
RTO staff confirmed the upgrades will be included in the model for the 2021/22 BRA.
AMP has become increasingly critical of transmission spending in PJM. In September, the company released a report showing that more than half of the $24.3 billion in transmission spending in the RTO since 2012 were supplemental projects by transmission owners and were not needed to comply with RTO or federal reliability requirements. (See Report Decries Rising PJM Tx Costs; Seeks Project Transparency.)