As extreme weather events become more common across the United States, regulators and grid operators are turning to customer-sited distributed energy resources (DERs) to help relieve strain on aging grid infrastructure and keep the power on during times of high energy demand. While historically the times of highest demand have occurred during warmer months, markets across the U.S. are also seeing an increase in winter demand in relation to growing electrification for heating.
CPower, a company that aggregates customer-sited DER, said its customers Special Data provided more than 50GWh of load relief during Winter Storm Elliott, in late December 2022, an amount of energy equivalent to the daily energy use of more than 1.7 million homes.
CPower dispatched customer DERs 197 times across three programs in the PJM and ISO-NE markets: PJM Emergency Capacity and Synch Reserves, and ISO-NE Active-Demand Capacity Reserves (ADCR).
The PJM market covers all or a portion of 13 states including Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, plus the District of Columbia.
The ISO-NE market covers the New England region which includes Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont.
Winter Storm Elliott was the first time PJM’s Emergency Capacity program called winter events since the 2014 Polar Vortex and the first capacity event in ISO-NE since the 2018 unplanned outage of the Mystic Generating Station that happened over Labor Day.
|
