NERC’s Board of Trustees expects to submit the ERO’s latest cold weather standard to FERC by April 7, several days after the March 27 deadline the commission set for the standard in 2024, staff said at the monthly meeting of NERC’s Standards Committee on March 19. 

Director of Standards Development Jamie Calderon told attendees the board is planning an open meeting April 4 to discuss the standard and that the ERO has already informed FERC the filing would come after the deadline. 

The standard has had an unusual path to passage, with the board ordering the SC in January to take over writing it after it failed to garner enough favorable votes from industry stakeholders to pass. Trustees exercised their authority under Section 321 of the ERO’s Rules of Procedure to sidestep the normal stakeholder approval process because they were concerned about missing FERC’s deadline. 

A team of volunteers completed work on EOP-012-3 (Extreme cold weather preparedness and operations) in January, and the SC posted it for a 45-day formal comment period that began Jan. 27 and ended March 12. (See NERC Cold Weather Standard Commenters Say More Work Needed.) Calderon said the delayed submission date was necessary because a “number of comments came in at the last minute” and the team needed more time to review them all. The SC plans to submit any relevant comments to the board along with the standard at its open meeting next month. 

Asked by Barry Lawson of Georgia Transmission whether NERC might consider pursuing “informal” extensions or arrangements with FERC in similar situations in the future, Calderon emphasized that the ERO took this route because of the “exigent circumstances” arising from the exercise of the Section 321 authority. 

“This is not the preferred operation,” Calderon said. “We do intend to file in the future, on time, every time. This was a truncated project with nine months [to finish], and the teams worked diligently over the winter holidays as well. We’re considering this to be extraordinary circumstances, due to the comments, that we will just be filing after that deadline. So it is not an extension or any agreement.” 

Trustee Sue Kelly, the board’s liaison to the SC, said that as a board member, she decided to support the delayed filing after thinking “really long and very hard.” Despite the FERC deadline, Kelly said that adhering to the original date would not have provided enough time to “give full faith and credit to the last round of comments.” Chief Engineer Mark Lauby agreed that “there were some very good [comments] in there [that] helped a great deal.” 

Review of Section 321 Planned

With Section 321 now having been invoked twice by the board in the past year, the SC has begun work on a guidance document to formalize its approach the next time the board uses its special authority. 

“None of us wants [Section 321] to come up again, but in the instance that it does, we just want to make sure we can walk through the process in a really efficient manner,” said Vice Chair Troy Brumfield of American Transmission Co., who has been organizing the effort. 

Brumfield said a group of volunteers from the SC will examine both uses of Section 321 to date. The board first invoked the rule in August 2024 to meet a FERC-imposed deadline for standards regarding inverter-based resource performance. (See “Board Invokes Standards Authority to Meet IBR Deadline,” NERC Board of Trustees/MRC Briefs: Aug. 15, 2024.) 

That decision involved Section 321.2-321.4, which called for a technical conference to resolve issues with the standard and a final ballot round with 60% stakeholder approval needed for passage. The board used a different part of Section 321 for the cold weather standard, dispensing with a conference and ballot altogether and putting authority in the SC to revise the standard. 

Calderon suggested that drawing on the SC’s experience could help prevent future delays like the one that affected EOP-012-3. 

“This was the first instance we issued 321.5,” the section used for the cold weather standard, Calderon said. “There’s going to be ample discussion on ensuring that that process is allotting sufficient time, should that be taken in the future.”