PJM Demand Response

Demand response programs provide an opportunity for commercial, institutional, and industrial organizations across PJM to earn incentive payments while helping maintain reliable electricity. When PJM determines there is not enough supply to meet demand and there is a risk of a blackout, a dispatch is transmitted to Enel’s demand response network, and participating organizations reduce their energy usage for a short period of time. Participants earn recurring capacity payments for agreeing to curtail electricity consumption in response to abnormally high demand – and additional energy payments based on their performance during dispatches.

• Maximize payments to your bottom line: Enel manages your participation from start to finish, ensuring you earn the highest possible financial reward. Since 2015, our customers have earned more than $1.325 billion in payments.
• Protect your operations: Demand response is one of the last lines of defense when brownouts or blackouts are imminent. The advanced notice you receive from demand response participation provides a window to prepare and prevent costly damage to your processes and equipment.
• Support your community: Your participation helps maintain reliable electricity throughout PJM and provides a clean, cost-effective alternative to building new power plants in the community.

As those who were impacted by 2014’s extreme weather event known as the Polar Vortex experienced firsthand, grid-related emergencies are not isolated to summer months. PJM has since implemented measures to ensure greater reliability of generation resources during winter months, but they also recognize the need to have a more dynamic resource in their energy supply stack throughout the year. 

Demand response offers clean, reliable, and direct relief to the grid that would otherwise require the use of high investment, fossil-fuel powered resources like peaking power plants. Participation in demand response not only prevents rolling blackouts but keeps consumers informed of important grid conditions and reduces energy costs for ratepayers.

Enel makes participation easy. We take care of the complex details so you can stay focused on running your business.

1. Our expert team will work with you to identify your energy reduction potential and create a strategy that delivers maximum value with minimum impact on your operations. We outline these measures in a detailed Energy Reduction Plan.
2. In some cases, we install necessary metering devices at your facility to establish communication with our Network Operations Center (NOC), so we can monitor your energy consumption levels in real time.
3. Your site is then enrolled and ready to respond when a dispatch begins. Provided your site has Enel metering, log into our app at any time during a dispatch to view your real-time performance.
4. Throughout the process, we fully manage enrollment, measurement, verification and payments on your behalf.

• Notification: When PJM anticipates high demand on the grid, they dispatch the Enel network into action. Enel will notify you via email, phone or SMS, depending on your preferences, to inform you when the dispatch will begin.
• Response: At the start of the dispatch, your facility will reduce its electricity usage according to your predetermined Energy Reduction Plan – either manually or, if requested, automatically through the NOC.
• Support: Before, during, and after a dispatch, our NOC remains in communication with your facility. Our staff is available 24x7x365, supporting you to ensure that you achieve the highest possible levels of performance and payments.

Enel has extensive experience creating reduction strategies that work within the operational limitations of a wide variety of unique facilities within PJM, including cold storage, manufacturers, food processors, universities, malls, office buildings and more. 

Common reduction examples include:

• Reduce non-essential lighting
• Modify manufacturing processes
• Adjust HVAC equipment
• Dial back pumps
• Change settings in industrial freezers

Our customers find that many energy-intensive processes can simply be shifted by a few hours to facilitate dispatch participation. And if you have a generator set, we can help ensure its compliance for use in demand response. Ask us about our experience working with customers like you.

Emergency dispatches occur when demand for electricity threatens to outstrip supply, creating a reliability issue. This situation often occurs on extremely hot days in the summer when increased HVAC usage causes demand to reach unusually high levels, typically resulting in transmission congestion. In other cases, demand response dispatches can occur when there is a reduction in available supply from, for example, a generator or power plant tripping offline or running out of fuel. In either case, very specific reliability conditions have to be met in order for PJM to dispatch their demand response network. When dispatched, you are responding to a very real grid emergency. Your participation is critical for ensuring that the lights stay on in your community.

Your PJM zone, seasonal weather, grid congestion and other local factors will influence how often you are dispatched. Historically, PJM has called 1 – 2 dispatches per year in any given zone. If an emergency dispatch is not called, PJM will schedule a two-hour audit for demand response participants to demonstrate performance capabilities.

Since 2007, PJM has called a total of 70 emergency dispatches. There have been very few mandatory events since 2014 – the last mandatory event took place in 2022, when a system-wide emergency from Winter Storm Elliott occurred on December 23 and 24 that lasted, on average, 17 hours total – unprecedented in PJM history.

PJM uses different methodologies to calculate capacity and energy baselines for participants. Enel’s software includes individual performance targets based on the PJM-defined baselines.

Summer baseline for capacity payments: equal to the Peak Load Contribution (PLC). The PLC value is determined based on the participant’s average demand during the 5 highest peak hours of the 5 highest peak days on the entire PJM grid during the previous summer.

Winter baseline for capacity payments: equal to the Winter Peak Load (WPL). The WPL value is similar to the PLC, however it is based on an individual participant’s peak demand between the hours of 6:00 AM and 9:00 PM ET on the 5 highest peak days from the previous winter.

Baseline for energy payments (all seasons): based on a participant’s average demand during the dispatch hours on the preceding days. Participants are compensated for any real-time reductions below the energy baseline.

Our experts are standing by to speak with you about your organization’s demand response opportunity in PJM and help you stake a claim on record demand response pricing. Submit your information here to get a conversation started with our team.