Robust resource adequacy planning in the face of coal retirements

We investigate the resource adequacy requirements of the PJM Interconnection, and the sensitivity of capacity procurement decisions to the choice of reliability metric used to measure resource adequacy. Assuming that plants fail independently, we find that PJM's 2010 reserve margin of 20.5% was sufficient to achieve the stated reliability standard of one loss of load event per ten years, with 0.012 expected loss of load events per year. PJM could reduce reserve margins to 13% and still achieve adequate levels of reliability as measured by the 2.4 Loss of Load Hours metric and the 0.001% Unserved Energy metric, which are used by other U.S. and international systems. A reserve margin of 13–15% would minimize long-run system costs. Reducing reserve margins from 20.5% to 13% in 2010 would have reduced PJM's capacity procurement by 11 GW, the same amount of coal capacity that PJM has identified as at high risk of retirement. We also investigate the risk posed by correlated failures among generators, a risk traditionally not modeled by system planners. We illustrate that three types of correlated failures may increase outage risks: natural gas supply disruptions, reduced reliability among generators during winter months, and the simultaneous shutdown of multiple nuclear generators for regulatory reasons. - Highlights: • We model resource adequacy in the PJM Interconnection. • If plant failures are independent, PJM could retire 11 GW of "at-risk" coal. • If plant failures are correlated, risks of supply shortages may be high.