Two members of the Senate Energy committee cited PJM to support their concerns about the impact of the Environmental Protection Agency’s pending greenhouse gas regulations.

FERC will hold a technical conference April 1 to discuss issues raised by this winter’s extreme cold, which exposed vulnerabilities in the grid’s increasing reliance on natural-gas fired generation.

Wednesday’s ice storm cut power to more than 1 million in the Philadelphia area, with Peco Energy recording a new winter outage record. RTO Insider Editor Rich Heidorn Jr. was there and brings you all the details.

News briefs from the states within the PJM footprint. This week we include Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

Four out of five Reliability Must-Run generation units in the ATSI zone will shut down this year rather than 2015.

Plunging temperatures sent natural gas spot prices soaring again this week, prompting PJM today to seek approval from federal regulators to lift the $1,000/MWh price cap on generation.

FERC gave preliminary approval last week to rules drafted by NERC to protect the electric grid from geomagnetic disturbances (GMDs) and a final OK to a reliability standard for frequency response.

PJM’s dispatch of demand response helped avoid the need to shed load during the polar vortex Jan. 7, when the RTO set a new winter demand record of about 141,500 MW.

The Planning Committee last week endorsed manual changes implementing PJM’s new capacity import limits.

As expected, PJM transmission planners said last week they will recommend the PJM Board of Managers approve FirstEnergy’s proposed $8 million congestion-relief upgrade in the MetEd zone.