Inefficiencies of NERC's transmission loading relief procedures

Electricity Journal

Volumn 11, Issue 8, 1998, Pages 47-54

  Rajaraman, Rajesh ^b   Alvarado, Fernando L ^a  

^a University of Wisconsin   (United States)

^b NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

HIGH PRICE; LOCATION BASED; NETWORKS SECURITY; PRICE VOLATILITY; TRANSMISSION LOADING RELIEFS; TRANSMISSION PRICE;

NETWORK SECURITY;

EID: 0003112464     PISSN: 10406190     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/S1040-6190(98)00079-7     Document Type: Article

References (9)

1. Policy Meant to Keep Electricity Grid Working Worsens Supply Shortages, May Lessen Reliability, Power Team Says, THE POWER MARKETING ASSN. DAILY POWER REPORT ONLINE, quoted from http:// www.newspage.com/export, July 7, 1998.
2. See NERC Policy 9, Security Coordinator Procedures, Draft 3, June 8, 1998, in Appendix C, Loading Relief Procedures.
3. NERC Web site, draft of "Petition for Declaration Order Regarding NERC's Transmission Loading Relief Procedures and Request for Expedited Consideration," North American Electric Reliability Council, June 5, 1998.
4. Throughout the paper, "percent" refers to the percentage of the scheduled transaction that flows through the flow-gate. It should not be confused with the percentage of the actual flow in the flowgate.
5. For example, it is possible that Jill's phantom schedule could have caused overload problems in one or more of other three flowgates of interest (AX, AE, and XY flowgates) in Figure 1. It may also be noted that quoting a larger transaction than truly intended as a result of anticipated congestion involves risk. For example, there is the issue of potentially larger transmission non-refundable reservation payments for trying to reserve larger transmission capacity. However, all this does is to raise the bar for playing the phantom-trade game, which under congested conditions could still be quite rewarding.
6. For ease of illustration, we have implicitly assumed that the prices shown in Table 5 hold over a sufficiently large transaction block, that rearranging other trades not shown in Table 5 have a higher cost, and that redispatch does not cause additional congestion in other flowgates. Moreover, we have ignored transmission losses.
7. There are a number of other examples that make similar points. For example, Bill Hogan has pointed out in an email communication to us that if more than one flowgate is congested, "the NERC TLR rules could in principle lead to conflicting curtailment instructions that would not succeed in eliminating the constraint violation." Harry Singh also points out that, potentially, thousands of transactions are affected by the TLR procedure, and it is questionable whether it is feasible for an SC to make so many phone calls in real time.
8. A less desirable alternative is to use the NERC rule on packaged trades. In other words, packaged multilateral transactions are considered as a single trade.
9. This is equivalent to nodal pricing, with the slight difference that it does not collect transmission charges for transmission losses and that these must be accounted for separately.