VALLEY FORGE, Pa. — Stu Bresler, senior vice president for market operations, told the Market Implementation Committee Wednesday that discussions with market participants and among staff have highlighted the need for manual changes to clarify rules regarding capacity bilateral transactions.

“Neither the Tariff nor the manual provides clarity about those transactions,” said Bresler, delineating them as unit-specific, auction-specific and locational unforced capacity.

He explained that in such transactions, the performance obligation remains with the seller, while the title to the megawatts for the capacity is transferred to the buyer. If the resource earns bonus credits, they go to the buyer.

At issue is the physical nature of the transactions, Bresler said.

“A court could say it’s not a physical transfer of megawatts, it’s just an assignment of receivables,” he said. “The more the physicality of a transaction is questionable, the more likely in a bankruptcy proceeding that the credit associated with that would be yanked away from the buyer and included in the bankruptcy estate.”

A second issue involves the fact that a buyer indemnifies PJM against a seller’s non-performance. “What happens if the seller in the transaction replaces the resource that was the subject of the transaction in the first place?” Bresler said. “What should the replacement rules be?”

Bresler suggested that the issue be expedited.

After Months of Debate, Data Confidentiality Rule Changes Endorsed

With 16 opposing votes, members endorsed changes to data confidentiality rules that have been the subject of debate since June. (See “Market Data Confidentiality Rule Change Gets First Reading,” PJM Market Implementation Briefs.)

Current rules prohibit PJM from talking about certain information even after it’s been disclosed publicly. At the heart of the deliberation has been how to provide PJM the ability to discuss situations such as generator outages while at the same time not disclosing commercially sensitive information.

The proposal allows PJM to release and discuss:

• Information on individual generation outages involving an unusual operating condition on the transmission system such as a severe weather event;
• The amount of demand response in an area no smaller than three ZIP codes (specific offers or suppliers would remain confidential);
• The total amount of capacity offered and cleared, aggregated by transmission zone;
• Uplift payments in an area no smaller than a transmission zone, and for no shorter a time period than one operating day;
• Aggregated statistics related to the results of the three pivotal supplier test; and
• Data made public by a PJM member or a state or federal regulator.

One minor change was made since the first reading. A sentence was added to specify the circumstances in which DR information would be released. The revised language allows such disclosures for incidents including, but not limited to, a severe event on the transmission system, a severe weather event, the formation of a closed-loop interface or the need for a transmission system upgrade.

Operating Parameters to be Subject of Special Session

An educational session will be held Feb. 24 to explain updated operating parameter definitions.

A number of operating parameters whose definitions appear only in the eMKT/Markets Gateway Users Guide have led to confusion among members about what values should be entered.

PJM also wants to clarify several terms in Manual 15.

A new “soak time” parameter has been proposed that would define the minimum length of time a unit must run to reach its economic minimum.

— Suzanne Herel