Advanced Technologies & Innovation
PJM embraces innovation and fosters collaboration on emerging grid technologies, concepts and trends that are shaping the future of the electric power industry and that will impact the PJM region.
Partner with PJM
PJM supports innovation in-house, in partnerships and through its Advanced Technology Pilot Program. If you have a project that you are in the process of developing or testing and are interested in collaborating with PJM through the Advanced Technology Pilot Program, please review the application process for new pilots DOC. If you have any additional questions, please contact PJM.
Learn more about PJM's and its partners' energy innovations on the PJM Learning Center or in PJM’s Advanced Technology Initiative brochure PDF.
Pilot Project Highlights
The technologies and concepts explored through the pilot program have demonstrated value to both PJM and the industry as a whole.
Active Projects
Data Centers and Load Flexibility
Powering the rapid increase in electricity demand from data centers is an issue having profound impacts across the power sector.
In addition to building new generation and transmission to meet this demand growth, data centers themselves can help grid operators meet demand by controlling their own energy use, especially during peak load periods or other emergency conditions.
Through an industry collaborative called DCFlex, led by the Electric Power Research Institute, PJM is partnering with Emerald AI and other industry partners to demonstrate the capabilities of a novel source of flexibility – compute flexibility.
Compute flexibility is a process to reduce the energy intensity of data center computational jobs with minimal customer service impacts in order to lower the overall power demand of the data center. Emerald AI is demonstrating this technology at multiple data centers across the PJM service area, including an NVIDIA AI factory in Manassas, Virginia.
Elk Neck Battery Storage ‘Virtual Power Plant’
To demonstrate the value of virtual power plants (VPPs) at both the retail and wholesale levels, PJM and Delmarva Power partnered to explore how the new Elk Neck Battery Storage VPP could participate in the region’s wholesale market for ancillary services.
The project involves a residential community on the Elk Neck Peninsula in Cecil County, Maryland. Each of the 110 homes involved is equipped with battery storage that can serve the energy needs of the individual homeowners or, aggregated and controlled together, provide reliability services to the local distribution system – as well as the RTO – by both charging and discharging from the grid.
The project was approved by the Maryland Public Service Commission under the Maryland Energy Storage Pilot Program.