Full Title: Transmission Planning for PJM’s Future Load and Generation Version 1
Author(s): Zach Zimmerman, Dinos Gonatas, Anjali Patel, and Rob Gramlich
Publisher(s): Grid Strategies LLC and Americans for a Clean Energy Grid (ACEG)
Publication Date: May 1, 2024
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
The United States needs to expand electricity transmission capacity to meet growing demand,
facilitate new generation interconnection and retirements, provide resilience against extreme
weather, and reduce cap constraints hindering access to low-cost energy sources. However,
building new high-capacity transmission is challenging, and currently not enough high-capacity
lines are being planned or developed.
A key barrier to transmission development is a lack of proactive transmission planning.
Opponents and skeptics of proactive planning often raise the specter of uncertainty and
speculation as a roadblock to achieving robust and reliable results. But these concerns will not
be resolved by ignoring the massive changes impacting the energy industry and continuing to
plan reactively. Rather, uncertainty is best addressed by incorporating best available data on
the future resource mix to conduct scenario analyses in which different futures are tested to
determine the optimum set of transmission solutions, all of which is now required for regional
transmission planning by FERC Order No. 1920.1
Proactive, scenario-based long-term regional planning is especially critical for PJM because
many states have deregulated utilities and rely on PJM’s interconnection queue and regional
capacity market. This paradigm necessitates greater regional planning and coordination to
ensure the transmission needed is planned and developed to provide ratepayers with reliable
and affordable power given the reality of the future generation mix.
While there is no singular right way to plan, there are better and worse ways. They developed
this report to demonstrate that there is better data available to inform a more robust planning
process. They focus here on the initial inputs on which PJM transmission plans should be based–
load, retirements, and new generation needs. The information presented herein is not intended
to set the boundaries on how PJM’s assumptions and planning processes should evolve, but
rather should serve as a platform to encourage a broader discussion on needed improvements