Poster Paper:
Designing Grid By Democracy: A Study of Coalition in the Pjm Regional Transmission Organization
Friday, April 7, 2017
George Mason University Schar School of Policy
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
In the United States, Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) operate the power grid serving nearly 70% of electricity consumers in the nation and make critical policy decisions such as how to adapt to new technology and environmental mandates applied to the electricity sector. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) wants RTOs to be stakeholder-driven organizations for making such decisions, but recent failure of the stakeholder process for establishing a resolution suggests some tension between FERC’s desire for inclusive decision-making and the critical reliability functions that RTOs serve. In particular, coalitions of stakeholders may collectively wield pivotal power over PJM’s rulemaking process, just as suppliers are deemed to be pivotal and possess market power in the energy, capacity or ancillary services markets. We use detailed voting data from the PJM stakeholder process to identify pivotal voters and measure their voting power. Also, we investigate how defection from presumed supplier/consumer coalition and abstention influence dynamics of voting power. By modifying Banzhaf index – classical voting power index from the political economy literature – separating already-decided voters and undecided voters, we demonstrate three aspects of voting power distribution. First, voters who have a strong interest in the issue, or decided voters, have no voting power whereas voters who do not have immediate stake, or undecided voters, might have voting power over a group of strongly-interested voters, or a coalition. Although no voter has voting power when a coalition have sufficient voting score, when the coalition lacks a few more votes, a small group of undecided voters have exclusive voting power. Second, defection and abstention have influence on voting power distribution only when a coalition does not have enough voting score. However, when there are enough defections from Strongly-committed sector, they transfer voting power to swing voters in Weakly-committed/Divided sector. If there is no Strongly-committed sector, then voters with greater voting weight would get greater political power than one with smaller weight. Third, defection has greater impact on voting power distribution than abstention in most of the time except a specific case. This implies that in a strategic point of view defection has stronger implication than abstention in terms of withdrawing from a coalition and transferring voting power to others.
