The PJM Synchronized Reserve Market provides PJM members with a market-based system for the purchase and sale of the synchronized reserve ancillary service. Demand resources that choose to participate in the Synchronized Reserve Market must be capable of dependably providing a response within 10 minutes and must have the appropriate metering infrastructure in place to verify their response and compliance with reliability requirements and market rules.

Synchronized reserve service supplies electricity if the grid has an unexpected need for more power on short notice. The power output of generating units supplying synchronized reserve can be increased quickly to supply the needed energy to balance supply and demand; demand resources also can bid to supply synchronized reserve by reducing their energy use on short notice.

Operation
The Synchronized Reserve Market is cleared every hour based on the offers that are submitted by various resources. The market clearing results establish the synchronized reserve assignments for each cleared resource in order to meet the synchronized reserve requirement for the entire market and for any constrained subregions of the market. Each assigned resource is paid the synchronized reserve clearing price for providing the service for the hour.

Requirements
The Synchronized Reserve Market provides an opportunity for competitive development and investment in demand response infrastructure. The payments to resources that clear in the Synchronized Reserve Market are compensation for the resources to be available to respond within 10 minutes. Therefore, while demand response resources must install infrastructure to allow them to curtail their consumption of electricity within 10 minutes, they will be requested to curtail only when system conditions require the 10-minute response.

Under current market rules, demand resources must provide metering information at no less then a one-minute scan rate surrounding a call for synchronized reserves. The metering information must be uploaded to PJM’s Load Response eTool within 24 hours of the event to ensure compliance. The overall participation by demand resources currently is limited to 25 percent of the synchronized reserve requirement in each reserve zone while PJM and ReliabilityFirst Corp. gain experience with demand response participation in this market.

To ensure that proper reliability standards are maintained, there are mandatory training requirements for Curtailment Service Providers that desire to bid demand reductions in the Synchronized Reserve Market.