NYISO Members OK End to Con Ed-PSEG Wheel

RENSSELAER, N.Y. — The NYISO Management Committee on Wednesday approved an agreement with PJM to end the 1,000-MW Con Ed-PSEG wheel next year while maintaining an operational base flow (OBF) of 400 MW that will be reduced to zero by 2021.

Consolidated Edison said it would not renew its contract with PJM when the current agreement expires next spring because it is no longer needed to deliver upstate power into New York City. But the OBF is needed to maintain system reliability in northern New Jersey, says PJM.

The vote was unanimous with five abstentions, one from Public Service Enterprise Group.

“We don’t agree with PJM that the operational baseflow is needed,” PSEG’s Ken Carretta said.

NYISO COO Rick Gonzales declined to respond to that objection, which was raised repeatedly. “I’m not going to opine on what PJM has determined,” he said.

The wheeling service was implemented by modeling 1,000 MW flowing from NYISO to PJM over the JK (Ramapo-Waldwick) interface and from PJM to NYISO over the ABC (Hudson-Farragut and Linden-Goethals) interface.

Under draft language for the NYISO-PJM Joint Operating Agreement, the wheel will be temporarily replaced by an operational base flow — “an equal and opposite megawatt offset of power flows” over the Waldwick and ABC phase angle regulators to account for natural system flows over the JK and ABC interfaces.

Last week’s modifications more definitively set the size of the OBF and fixes the start and end date. “The initial 400-MW OBF, effective on May 1, 2017, is expected to be reduced to zero megawatts by June 1, 2021,” it says.

An annual review of the baseflow will be conducted starting next year, which then gives the grid operators two years’ notice to end it, unless they establish an earlier date.

PJM has said that the 2021 deactivation target materialized because it was the date that planning analyses determined the OBF was unnecessary. “With the projects that are expected to go into service, we aren’t seeing any operational need for an OBF,” PJM’s Paul McGlynn said at the Dec. 15 Transmission Expansion Advisory Committee meeting.