PJM Reports Natural Gas Power Plants Were Over Half The Forced Outages During Winter Storm Gerri In January; Special Procedures Used For Gas Generators Raised Questions About Market Impacts

 PJM Interconnection staff presentation slides for a February 8 meeting of the Operating Committee showed natural gas-fired power plants accounted for over half the forced outages of generating capacity during Winter Storm Gerri that occurred from January 14 to 22.

Don Kujawski, Operations Manager for PJM, said while natural gas had some “missteps,” overall performance was better than during Winter Storm Elliott in December 2022 when 70% of the outages were natural gas units.

However, the key difference between Elliott and Gerri was that Gerri primarily impacted the western region of PJM that does not include most of Pennsylvania, especially major natural gas producing areas. 

As a result, Gerri caused fewer problems with natural gas infrastructure in Pennsylvania, including gas production loss.

PJM staff said gas production declined by 1.3 billion cubic feet per day-- about a 4% decline in the Northeast US-- during Winter Storm Gerri.  

The much harder hit mid-continent and southeast areas of the US had a 27% and 28% decline, respectively.  Texas experienced a 22% decline.

During Winter Storm Elliot, natural gas production in Pennsylvania alone dropped by more than 20%, along with the loss of pipeline compression capacity that further restricted natural gas supplies, according to PJM.

PJM said during Gerri, all natural gas pipelines did experience various levels of daily and hourly capacity and contractual restrictions and there were only a couple of minor compressor station issues that were rectified relatively quickly.

Kujawski said for Gerri, PJM developed a new procedure for making sure natural gas-fired power plants would actually be able to produce power when called on by PJM.  They also had a special text group established with natural gas facilities to improve communications.

“So one of the things we did was we hedged our risk a little bit by calling the [natural gas] generation a little bit earlier, because there are different nomination timelines in the cycle, to make sure that they were able to get the gas now,” said Kujawski.

“So let's just say we scheduled them at two in the morning for 12 in the afternoon. I'm just making up times. That's going to accomplish a couple of things,” explained Kujawski

“One, it's going to give them the opportunity to get the gas, give them the dispatch instruction, be online at this time, which I think is a little bit greater lead time, which is going to help out the generators and hopefully increase their performance.

“Two, it is going to give us in dispatch the ability to react if they can't get online.  

“So let's just say we call them several hours in advance, tell them that we expect them online at a certain time. Then they call us back and say, "We can't get gas, it's not available. We're going to have to take an outage." 

“We have a lot more time to react to that information and then make other operational decisions. 

“During Winter Storm Elliott, we had very little notice of generator unavailability, so this is one of the reasons why we took this approach to give ourselves more time. Just in case there was generator unavailability, we would know it sooner,” said Kujawski.

There were questions from several Operations Committee members, other generators, about how this new procedure for natural gas generators would impact the PJM power market and prices. 

PJM said those questions were for a discussion at a later date.

Click Here for a copy of PJM’s presentation slides.

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[Posted: February 8, 2024]  PA Environment Digest