The 2025 Mid-America Regulatory Conference tackled themes on meaningful public engagement, nuclear options, bill affordability and DEI programs falling out of favor.
ISO-NE and stakeholders discussed market performance, capacity auction reforms, the RTO’s 2026 budget and asset condition spending at the summer meeting of the NEPOOL Participants Committee.
PJM experienced a preliminary peak load over 160 GW during the recent heat wave, surpassing the RTO’s summer forecast of 154 GW and requiring the deployment of pre-emergency demand response.
PJM presented changes to its submission and review processes for large load adjustments that are intended to provide stakeholders with more transparency before they are included in future load forecasts, as well as a draft proposal to standardize how it determines what share of LLAs will be included in its forecasts.
The month of May saw one spin event to PJM, a shared reserve event, three high-system-voltage actions and 24 post-contingency local load relief warnings, according to the RTO’s monthly operating metrics.
SERC said all subregions should have enough resources to handle normal summer conditions, but the Central subregion may see energy shortfalls during periods of extreme heat.
FERC will hold a two-day technical conference June 4-5, where it will look at resource adequacy issues in the ISO/RTO markets, with most of the focus on those with capacity markets.
Experts in the data center field discussed the challenges of meeting accelerating computational load during the PJM Annual Meeting, held in the core of Northern Virginia’s Data Center Alley.
The preliminary results of PJM’s look ahead at the capacity available for this summer and the expected peak loads suggest that about 5.4 GW of demand response could be needed to maintain the 3.5-GW real-time primary reserve requirement.
