By Rich Heidorn Jr. and David Jwanier

Two weeks before Memorial Day, PJM and stakeholders are already worrying about next winter.

On Friday, PJM issued a comprehensive report on its response to the historic power demand during January’s deep freeze, adding nine proposed recommendations for action to five initiatives already underway.

Members began work on one of the new proposals last week, as the Operating Committee approved a problem statement and issue charge to consider resuming winter testing of generators. The testing would attempt to prevent a repeat of the poor generator performance in early January, when PJM saw a 22% forced outage rate, about three times its historic 7% average.

New Recommendations

The new recommendations in the 69-page report on January’s operational challenges focus on improving generator performance; handling of fuel-limited units; interregional coordination; unit commitment procedures; regulation market rules; and communications. (See Winter Report Recommendations.)

PJM executives Mike Kormos and Andy Ott answered questions about the report at the Capacity Senior Task Force meeting Friday.

Kormos, executive vice president of operations, said PJM staff is working on ways to quantify the risks identified in the report in order to prioritize the recommendations. “Is it a hair-on-fire, we-need-to-take-action-really-really-quick [issue] or is there more time?”

A common theme in the recommendations was the need to improve information-sharing to ensure operators know what generators have sufficient fuel and can be counted on to run. In tracking external resources, Kormos said, “we were doing a lot of things on spreadsheets and Post-it notes.”

Kormos also talked of the difficulty forecasting load on days when the weather made a big transition from one day to the next. “I don’t think any of us knew where load was going to end up,” he said.

Ott, executive vice president for markets, said PJM will also reconsider the way it schedules units. Because of restrictive gas pipeline rules, the RTO was often paying the most to run the least flexible units, an “inversion” of the normal situation.

“This is stuff we had never seen before and we didn’t necessarily have procedures for everything we saw,” he said.

“We’re used to calling every steam unit on during peak conditions,” added Kormos. “That may not have been the right answer.”

Testing

The Operating Committee unanimously approved the initiative to consider winter generator testing.

Mike Bryson, executive director of system operations, said designing a test that will be effective will be a challenge. PJM had winter testing until 2010, when the RTO decided to defer to new regional Reliability First Corp. standards, which were less burdensome and less costly.

The former rules allowed generators to test as late as February, which was often too late to address extreme cold conditions, officials said. Some stakeholders have questioned whether testing in December would truly help improve conditions at -10 degrees.

“I want to make sure we’re not doing testing for optics,” Bryson said. “Let’s take the 22% [outage rate] and find a way to improve it to a level that’s more typical of winter.”

Bryson said consideration of incentives for generator performance and penalties for failures would be considered in a separate initiative.