PJM: Transmission Expansion Advisory Committee Meeting
Spent a perfectly good autumn afternoon trapped in a WebEx with our grid overlords at PJM’s Transmission Expansion Advisory Committee. Two hours, twenty-two minutes, and forty seconds I will never get back. The first eight agenda items sailed by in a merciful forty-minute blur of checkbox updates that somehow still felt padded. One minor detail slipped through: Dominion casually noted at least three canceled interconnection requests in King George County and Fredericksburg, each flagged as a data center, each listed as “100 MW or more” (which, in PJM-speak, could mean anything up to a small city). When someone asked whether any of those loads had been baked into the reliability “need” that supposedly justifies new transmission, the answer was the usual crisp no. Of course not.
Then we reached the main event: Agenda Item 9, Reliability Analysis Update. Valley Link’s cost estimate has ballooned and the in-service date has slipped eighteen months. The previous eight items drew maybe four polite questions total. This one immediately produced a queue of at least ten people, mostly actual ratepayers. Citizen advocate Mike Regan was second in line, a bit slow on the draw, by his standards. He asked how Joshua Falls, the critical starting point for the line, could simply be removed from the project. The reply was a familiar bureaucratic ballet: segmentation is normal, everything will be fine, nothing to see here. When he followed up with the obvious question: can the line and Yeat substation actually go into service without Joshua Falls? there was a long, eloquent silence before the Valley Link representative managed to say the line would need a substation on both ends and left it at that. Regan also noted the lack of PJM Board approval for the new Joshua Falls substation. After the obligatory word salad, staff explained that the Board will approve it at the next meeting in November, which rather clarified that the board vote is a formality. They also let slip that Valley Link expects to file with the Virginia SCC in December. Splendid.
My turn. First question: Valley Link has repeatedly insisted, on the record and in writing, that the June 2029 in-service date was non-negotiable because of predicted grid violations beginning that year. The date is now January 2031. Are those violations no longer expected? The answer was unexpectedly breezy: no big deal, we’ll work around them. The same violations that previously HAD TO BE FIXED BY 2029 will simply be managed with a few operational tweaks. I had assumed the loads driving the original urgency had either disappeared or been delayed. Apparently not. The grid will keep humming along. What a relief.
Second question: costs are up substantially (greenfield land acquisition is part of it), the schedule has relaxed by eighteen months, so why not reassess the project against the brownfield alternatives that originally competed with Joshua Falls–Yeat? Answer: land is only 15 percent of the increase. Later responses made clear that PJM has no intention of re-competing a project of this complexity; they believe they would waste time and end up with the same answer. Naturally.
Other highlights:
All three projects; Valley Link South (Joshua Falls to Yeat), Valley Link North, and MARL, must be built. Without every one of them, there is no N+1 reliability. Misery loves company, and apparently so does the reliability analysis.
The 114-mile Dominion portion of Joshua Falls–Yeat has gone from $426.83 million to $1.176 billion. That figure excludes both substations. A 175 percent increase in two years. Anyone care to guess the final number by 2031?
Yeat substation: $197 million to $370 million. Equally understated.
Engineering design on Joshua Falls–Yeat is 30 percent complete. One might have expected more progress by now.
The tone of the answers was consistent: this is all normal, cost increases are expected, project segmentation happens all the time, and everyone has already put in so much work.
Prediction: Valley Link will unveil the preferred routes the week of December 2, hold the highly informative virtual meeting the week of December 9, and file with the SCC the week after that, just in time for Christmas. Jing-a-ling.
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