VALLEY FORGE, Pa. — PJM moved the day-ahead energy market offer deadline to 10:30 a.m. from noon without incident April 1, PJM’s Adam Keech told the Market Implementation Committee Wednesday.
“We didn’t have many people complaining, ‘We missed the window,’” he said.
Offers were cleared in 2.5 hours on average, within the desired three-hour window. It helped that the system load was light, he said.
Commented Independent Market Monitor Joe Bowring: “We did notice that the liquidity of the gas market had not shifted to earlier in the morning just yet.”
But when he asked members if anyone else had observed the same, no one spoke up.
The scheduling change aims to better align the gas and electric markets. (See PJM Moving on Day-Ahead Schedule Changes.)
Members Endorse New Way to Measure Emergency DR
Members unanimously endorsed changes in how demand response is measured and verified in emergency situations.
Existing procedures, which use the hour before an event as the default customer baseline (CBL), can be inaccurate in the early morning or on days with multiple dispatches, PJM’s Pete Langbein said. It also can require a cumbersome administrative review process.
The new method changes the emergency energy default CBL from the hour before to the current default economic CBL.
It also eliminates the ability to create an economic registration after the fact and use the CBL to settle the event.
The new process is expected to measure energy load reduction more accurately and be consistent with the calculation of non-summer compliance under the new Capacity Performance model.
The changes were ready to be implemented in 2014, but PJM held off until the Supreme Court ruled that DR would remain in the energy market. (See Supreme Court Upholds FERC Jurisdiction over DR.)
Allocating Spot-in Service for NYISO Imports to be Studied
With seven abstentions, the committee approved a problem statement and issue charge to study how to improve the process of allocating spot-in transmission for energy imports from NYISO.
Vitol’s Joe Wadsworth, who presented the proposal, said the timing of the markets and the first-come-first-serve method of reserving spot-in transmission make it difficult for participants to efficiently schedule such imports.
PJM opens the window to reserving next-day spot-in service at 9 a.m., but NYISO doesn’t release its day-ahead market results until at least 9:35 a.m. and sometimes as late as 11 a.m., Wadsworth said.
Thus, participants who use spot-in transmission to compete on near-term import supply opportunities at the seam may have to reserve the service before they find out what has cleared in NYISO, he said.
Spot-in is free but limited in quantity, and there is no priority for participants who have cleared the NYISO market.
“If you can’t get spot-in transmission for your imports, then your day-ahead transactions can be curtailed, and suddenly you may have exposure to real-time prices,” he said.
Work on the issue is expected to take six to nine months.
No one voiced similar concerns with MISO at the meeting.
Changes to Emergency Procedures Tool Coming in May
Members received an update on PJM’s emergency procedures, which are changing because of the June 1 implementation of Capacity Performance.
Initial adjustments will be visible in the online emergency procedures tool on May 5 so they may be used for the summer emergency procedures drill, which is scheduled for May 10.
More changes will come on May 26. They include new fields, tabs, timestamps and flags giving members information on performance assessment hours.
Also new is a “deploy all resources” action for emergency events that occur without warning as opposed to evolving over time. The purpose of the action is to instruct members to dispatch all generation resources and implement load reductions immediately.
24-hour Max Run Time Parameter Set for June 1
PJM intends to implement a maximum run time parameter value of 24 hours June 1 for all generation resources except for pumped hydro power and market sellers who believe their resource cannot meet that value.
Documentation to that effect must be submitted to unitspecificpls@pjm.com by April 20.
Supporting documents must include original equipment manufacturer specifications of unit constraints.
Max run time values will be issued by May 15.
Settlement C Discussion Terminated
Members voted to approve the Market Settlement Subcommittee’s request to stop work on establishing a “Settlement C” method that would allow electricity distribution companies to resolve billing errors beyond the 60-day Settlement B time frame.
The group had been working on the issue since September.
In a subcommittee poll of 22 responders representing 119 participants, 40% voted to continue to develop a solution, while the rest chose maintaining the status quo. At the MIC, 64% voted to kill the initiative.
PJM Proposes Clarifications to Bilateral Transactions
PJM proposed revised rules regarding bilateral capacity transactions that would maintain the physical nature of the deals to ensure members’ indemnification.
In such transactions, a seller transfers capacity to a buyer but retains the obligation for performance. (See “PJM Proposes Clarifications to Capacity Bilateral Transactions,” PJM Market Implementation Committee Briefs.)
The proposal assigns bonus payments to the buyer in proportion to the megawatts transacted. It also requires that any replacement transactions entered into by the seller be traceable. Therefore, this would not be able to be done in an incremental auction.
“If they went into an incremental auction to do this, all the parties would lose the visibility of who now is [providing the capacity that was] originally part of the bilateral,” Assistant General Counsel Jen Tribulski said. “We thought that these transactions would be best served if the seller was able to replace them, but not by an incremental auction.”
The clarifications will require a Tariff change.
— Suzanne Herel