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
Elk Neck Battery Storage ‘Virtual Power Plant’
PJM has partnered with Delmarva Power to explore how a new battery storage “virtual power plant” on the Elk Neck Peninsula in Cecil County, Maryland, will participate in the region’s wholesale market for ancillary services.
The project involves a residential community located on the Elk Neck Peninsula in the Chesapeake Bay. 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.
Budderfly, a provider of distributed energy resource (DER) control, orchestration and aggregation platforms, is collaborating with Delmarva on the project. The project will serve as a virtual power plant (VPP) and is the first battery energy storage residential VPP to participate in PJM’s wholesale markets.
The pilot program provides a unique use case for the PJM footprint, offering operational coordination with the aggregator and utility, locational modeling of DER and retail customer load interactions.