Operations

Control room operators, as well as information technology, security and facility teams, continued their on-site work throughout 2020 and into 2021, with many new cleaning, reduced touch point and social distancing protocols implemented to minimize the potential spread of the virus among essential personnel. PJM held hundreds of stakeholder meetings remotely over the course of the year, quickly pivoting to ensure the stakeholder process continued without interruption.

With the reliability of the grid being the top priority, PJM utilized a number of communications channels to stay connected with staff, members and other stakeholders. PJM provided updates and shared information through its Info-Connection web page, created a dedicated Pandemic Coordination page on its website and held virtual information-sharing sessions to keep members, stakeholders and industry officials informed throughout the unprecedented extended pandemic.

Sequestered Operations

To help ensure reliability and limit exposure for critical on-site staff, PJM quickly and efficiently built a fully functioning on-site third control room to supplement the existing dual primary control centers. The repurposed space was not initially a designated North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) environment, so a cross-divisional effort was required to quickly establish it as such. The addition of the third control room allowed PJM to fully exercise its pandemic posture. From April through June 2020, this control room served as home for operators – sequestered on-site around-the-clock for 10 weeks – to ensure continuity of business operations at the height of the pandemic. PJM employees answered the call a second time to return to sequestered operations in December and continued in this stance into the new year. Living remotely from their families and friends in service to the grid, these operators are to be commended for their dedication to the reliability of our bulk electric system.

Through collaborations with PJM members – from transmission and generation owners to local utilities and public power entities – the system maintained a reliable flow of electricity everywhere it was needed, from hospitals to grocery stores to home offices.

It was not business as usual, but PJM, in lockstep with its members, embraced the challenges successfully with the guidance of a pandemic plan it initially had developed nearly a decade ago.

Managing Winter, Summer and Pandemic Conditions

Throughout 2020, PJM dispatched reliable, secure power for the needs of our 13-state and District of Columbia region and 65 million consumers served. For winter and summer and all through the year, PJM depended on preparations by its members and close coordination to reliably operate the system during all weather conditions. Extensive preparation efforts by PJM and members included testing resources, conducting seasonal drills and surveying generators for fuel inventory.

In mid-March, as businesses, schools and other consumers began closing or transitioning employees to work from home, energy usage routines across the PJM footprint began to change.

In a typical year, residential and commercial customers make up approximately 37% each of total load, with industrial consumers constituting 26% of load. But because weather and human behavior are the biggest drivers in the short-term load forecast, it soon became clear that energy usage patterns would change.

As expected, commercial demand dropped at the same time residential demand ticked up, driven by workers consuming electricity in their own homes while working remotely. The time of day people were using power changed because, for example, some of the commute evaporated. And this varied across the footprint, because different localities moved with differing degrees to first shut down and then reopen their economies. Ongoing collaboration and communication with members and stakeholders helped PJM understand the landscape and incorporate the findings into its load forecasting.

The key for PJM was pinpointing the effect on load from pandemic-related behaviors and managing the electricity load accordingly. In mid-March, when the widespread shutdown or curtailment of business began, PJM refined a short-term load-forecasting method to identify the impact of human behavioral changes on the demand for electricity.

In late March, power demand dropped about 7% from what would be a typical weekday. The most significant peak impacts took place in the first half of May, when power demand was down 11–15%. As of August, with increased economic activity and somewhat loosened social restrictions, peaks were coming in generally less than 5% under what we would have expected.