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Manu Asthana Focuses on Maintaining Reliability Amid Unexpected Challenges at Online Annual Meeting

May 5, 2020 by PJM

PJM President and CEO Manu Asthana outlined his priorities for
stakeholders during PJM’s Annual Meeting Monday, while expressing faith in the
system’s central role in the current pandemic as well as the nation’s long-term
“energy transformation.”

Four months into his job at PJM, Asthana received a warm welcome at
this year’s Annual Meeting for PJM’s 1,000-plus members. The meeting is usually
held at various venues within PJM’s footprint of 13 states and the District of
Columbia, but this year was limited to Webex, based on continuing
coronavirus-related travel and social distancing policies.

During the Members Committee event Monday, Asthana thanked members for
working together on “complex, important” issues such as the capacity market
changes ordered by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), changes to
PJM’s credit rules to protect stakeholders, the integration of storage
resources into the system, and PJM’s ongoing efforts to operate reliability
through the global pandemic.

PJM’s response to FERC’s order on the Minimum Offer Price Rule, or
MOPR, is the result of the organization’s commitment to listen wholeheartedly
and respond in collaboration to member and stakeholder concerns, he said. The
success of that open approach, both in PJM’s response to the FERC order and the
passage of credit rule reform, hopefully reflects “that the way we went about
the process was really steeped in listening.”

As he did earlier this week in a keynote
speech for the Energy Policy Roundtable in the PJM Footprint for power industry
professionals, Asthana identified his three priorities as:

  • Maintaining reliability of the bulk electrical
    system
  • Developing working relationships and solving
    challenging issues with stakeholders
  • Developing people within PJM

He also explained why he joined PJM.

“I wanted to have an impact that was greater than myself and the
organization that I led. I saw an opportunity to serve 65 million people and
saw our nation is going through an energy transformation driven by
environmental policies and technology … I saw PJM as potentially being at the
center of that,” he said. “Together we have an incredible opportunity to
harness the power of our markets to facilitate this transition in a way to
benefit the 65 million people who are counting on us. Many of them don’t even
know about us, and yet they are still counting on us to get it right.”

Asthana suggested that the future of PJM “is potentially very different
from the grid that we have today,” with very different generation resources and
reliability requirements. PJM can facilitate that strategic conversation going
forward, framing alternatives, working with and listening to stakeholders for
their collective thoughts, and striving to make choices together, he said.

PJM already delivers value to consumers and society, at an estimated
savings of between $3 billion and $4 billion annually. “We can go up from
there,” Asthana said. “The only way we get there is figuring this out together
with our Board of Managers, our members and our stakeholders.”

The critical importance of keeping the power flowing is underscored by
the ongoing health crisis, he said. PJM has taken a number of actions to
protect its critical workers –
including the setup of a third control room to secure service continuity via a
team of sequestered operators – while also learning from the lessons of an
unprecedented event.

“The reliable operation of the bulk power system is our number one
mission,” he said, “particularly in this time when you think about the
hospitals and the healthcare organizations counting on us to get it right and
the people at home counting on us to get it right.”

Original source: PJM

Filed Under: Corporate News, Northeast, Regions, Transmission and Distribution

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