Three Illinois nuclear power plants—Byron, Dresden, and Quad Cities—did not clear in June’s long-delayed PJM Interconnection capacity auction, Exelon Generation reported in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Braidwood and LaSalle did manage to clear in the auction. The Company also noted that Quad Cities will continue to operate despite its failure to clear, citing financial support from the state’s Future Energy Jobs Act, which took effect in 2017. Exelon specifically pointed to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s minimum offer price rule, recently implemented by PJM, as the reason Quad Cities was unsuccessful in the auction. Originally this auction was scheduled for May 2019, the 2022–2023 capacity auction was postponed until this year as FERC considered approval of the contentious minimum offer price rule. According to PJM, the auction procured 144,477 MW of resources for the period of June 1, 2022, through May 31, 2023, at a total cost of $3.9 billion—$4.4 billion less than in the most recent auction, in 2018.
PJM added that it secured commitments for power at $50/MW-day for much of its footprint, compared with the previous auction’s $140/MW-day—a decrease of 64 percent.
Future PJM auctions will follow this timeline, which could vary slightly:
The 2023/2024 Delivery Year auction will take place in December 2021
The 2024/2025 Delivery Year auction will take place in June 2022
The 2025/2026 Delivery Year auction will take place in January 2023
The 2026/2027 Delivery Year auction will take place in July 2023
Thereafter, the traditional annual timing of auctions takes place with the 2027/2028 Delivery Year auction scheduled for May 2024.