Seasonal Outlook (2018 Summer)

Seasonal Outlook (2018 Summer)

Seasonal Outlook SERC is a summer-peaking region that covers approximately 308,900 square miles and serves a population estimated at 39.4 million. The region comprises five diverse reporting areas identified as SERC-East, SERC-Central, SERC-Southeast, SERC-PJM, SERC-MISO Central, and SERC-MISO South. This 2018 summer outlook provides a high-level overview of generation resources available to meet the projected summer peak demands in those reporting areas. Key Findings: • Projected generation capacity resources suggest that there are sufficient resources within the SERC footprint to meet the load for the summer season peak. • Although there are no expected operational challenges during the summer, entities are monitoring the rapid growth of solar generation and developing new operational plans to manage the possibility of excess generation during light loading periods. • The predictability of loop flows continues to present a challenge in various areas. To address the issues, entities participate within SERC’s and neighboring entities’ study efforts to identify and analyze generation that will be online.

Summary of Summer Operating Conditions SERC’s independent review of the Region’s demand and capacity shows that summer peak reserve margin projections have been consistently above ~20% over the last three years, which indicates there are sufficient resources to meet the load during the summer peaks. Although entities performed extreme weather analysis for the summer, summer conditions are expected to be similar to 2017. The operational planning studies include the most up-to-date information, including load forecasts, transmission and generation outages, and firm transmission commitments for the time period studied. Additionally, summer hot weather scenarios are included in the operational planning studies to determine if unique operational challenges exist for the upcoming summer season.

Representation of the SERC portion of MISO and PJM is vastly different from the complete RTO footprint as planned and operated. Click the chart to view the summer operating projections for the complete RTO.

Dashboard Click the image to open interactive dashboard.