An unseasonable heat blast across the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic has landed in the middle of PJM Interconnection’s fall maintenance season, and the grid that serves 67 million people is running thin. PJM issued a Maximum Generation Alert for Tuesday and kept a capacity advisory in place through Wednesday, with roughly 62,000 megawatts of generation offline for planned work.
Bloomberg reported that spot power at PJM’s Western hub hit $1,021 per megawatt-hour Tuesday afternoon, more than double the day-ahead average for that hour. Day-ahead prices for Wednesday jumped 28% to $295.83 per megawatt-hour, the highest daily average since mid-July.
PJM forecast about 112,400 megawatts of demand for Tuesday, roughly two-thirds of the grid’s all-time peak of 165,563 megawatts set in 2006, so the strain is coming from the supply side. Generators and transmission owners use mid-September through early December to do upkeep ahead of winter, and PJM said power commitments to hot regions in the South and West cut into the cushion further. MISO, whose territory covers parts of 15 states, pointed to the same mix of warm weather, plant outages and weak wind output, according to spokeswoman McKenzie Barbknecht.
PJM spokesman Jeffrey Shields told Bloomberg that unpredictable weather is leaving “fewer days to perform important maintenance or construction” on generation and transmission equipment, and the pattern is getting familiar. PJM called on demand response in September with about 36,000 megawatts still offline, and it worked through a similar squeeze in May.
Beneath the weather is a grid with less slack than it used to have. PJM projects peak demand will climb 32 gigawatts between 2024 and 2030, all but 2 gigawatts of it from data centers, and its latest capacity auction came up 6,831 megawatts short of the reliability target. With that little room, every scheduled outage is a harder call.
PJM’s first lever is pulling maintenance back. It recalled all active generation maintenance tickets effective noon Wednesday, and the paired Load Management Alert put demand response customers, who are paid to cut use when the grid is stressed, on notice. DOE’s emergency order, which runs through Friday, is the backstop. It lets PJM run plants past environmental permit limits and, as a last resort before the most serious level of grid emergency, direct data centers and other large customers onto backup generation. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said DOE will use “every available tool to prevent blackouts,” and the department estimates more than 35 gigawatts of unused backup generation is available nationwide.
The longer-term fix drew a mixed ruling from FERC on Oct. 9. The commission approved PJM’s registry of large loads, defined as customers of 50 megawatts or more, but rejected the core of the grid operator’s plan, which would have let new data centers connect without bringing matching capacity if they agreed to be curtailed ahead of emergencies. FERC said the framework intrudes on state authority over retail rates and appears to discriminate against large loads, and it urged states to take the lead on deciding which customers get cut first. Commissioner David Rosner wrote separately that non-critical data centers should go before homes, hospitals and schools, but that states should set those priorities. About five weeks earlier, it rejected key elements of PJM’s proposed backstop capacity auction. PJM said it is reviewing the order. Jefferies analysts said the ruling could keep capacity prices higher for longer, a plus for independent power producers such as Constellation Energy, NRG Energy, Talen Energy and Vistra.
The recalled work still has to get done before the maintenance window closes in early December, and deferring it only pushes the problem into winter. During Winter Storm Fern in January, generator outages averaged 18 to 19 gigawatts, above the 15.9 gigawatts PJM’s seasonal projections had assumed, and equipment failures were by far the most common cause.
Автор: Майкл Керн Oilprice.com
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