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

PJM is consolidating its rules for establishing dynamic transfers, which allow resources in one balancing authority to be operated as if they were in another BA region.

Several PJM utilities released their fourth quarter earnings last week, but none made news like Exelon, which warned that it may shut down some of its nuclear generating stations if they can't compete against subsidized renewable generators and stubbornly low natural gas prices.

PJM members last week approved manual changes implementing the PJM seasonal verification rules, adding a transition period for units that have not been conducting the required tests.

The Planning and Operating committees endorsed changes to the following PJM Manuals: 7, 14A ,21 and 40.

PJM members will consider relaxing metering requirements to make it more practical for residential customers to offer demand response into the synchronous reserve market under a problem statement approved Friday.

PJM plans to change its definition of the PJM-MISO interface to eliminate double counting that can inflate congestion calculations in market-to-market transactions.

Load serving entities in PJM are starting to calculate how much their bills are going to increase for a frigid January, and they aren’t happy about it.

The review of proposed solutions to the Artificial Island transmission stability problem is taking PJM longer than expected and the selection of the winner could be months away.

PJM provided members a glimpse last week of the new visualization tools that will soon be available to transmission operators as a result of the deployment of synchrophasors.