PJM began voluntary winter testing of infrequently used generators last week, one of the RTO’s efforts to avoid the high level of forced outages last January.

“We had some units fail to start,” PJM’s Dave Schweitzer said. “That justifies this testing.”

The testing is open to units that have not run in the prior eight weeks, including dual-fuel units that have run only on their primary fuel during that time.

Some units that were initially nominated to participate were eliminated when they were called on to produce energy during November’s cold snap, Schweitzer said.

In a related matter, PJM said it expects to allow generators to begin testing in January on software revisions allowing them to update fuel costs intraday and to enter data on dual-fuel capabilities and operational restrictions.

Synchronized Reserve Performance Up with Increased Penalties

Tier 2 synchronized reserve resources have shown a big improvement in performance since PJM initiated tougher non-performance penalties in January.

Demand-side resources have provided 86% of assigned megawatts during synchronized-reserve events that lasted more than 10 minutes so far in 2014, up from 62% in 2013.

Generation resources showed an even bigger year-over-year improvement, to 89% in 2014 from 59% in 2013.

Since 2007, generation resources had achieved 80% or better performance only twice before. The connection between performance and the increased penalties is less clear for demand resources, which hit 85% in 2011 and 100% in 2012.

Both resource types also showed big year-over-year improvements for events lasting less than 10 minutes. For all events, demand resources provided 74% of assignments, up from 63% in 2013.

Generator performance rose to 77% from 55%, with combined-cycle units more than tripling their performance from 49% to 163%, once again the best among all generation types. Combined-cycle units’ performance had fallen by half between 2008 and 2013. (See CC’s Synchronized Reserve Performance Drops.)

PJM increased non-performance penalties effective Jan. 1 after determining that the previous rules — written when SR calls occurred about every three days — had lost their effectiveness as the calls became less frequent.