NERC continues to work on streamlining its slate of standards development projects to ease the burden on industry, members of the ERO’s Standards Committee heard at their quarterly in-person meeting, held at CAISO’s headquarters in Folsom, Calif. 

Reviewing the standards prioritization initiative that NERC staff have been pursuing since 2023, Manager of Standards Development Alison Oswald noted that the ERO has six projects under development that are classified as “high priority.” This category comprises projects that address “significant” risks, identified by the following criteria: 

• • subject of a NERC or FERC directive with a set due date; 
  • identified as a priority in NERC’s work plan; or 
  • recommended to address a specific risk by compliance feedback, stakeholder feedback or a study. 

NERC’s medium-priority projects, which account for five of the remaining current standards projects, must “steadily progress but … do not include a firm timeline,” Oswald said. These efforts may be in tandem with high-priority projects, address emerging risks, seek to clarify an existing standard, satisfy regulatory directives without a set deadline or originate from compliance or stakeholder feedback or a study. 

Low-priority projects “will be advanced as time and resources permit,” though Oswald emphasized that these still address real issues and their ranking is more a function of “resource management and NERC’s agile framework than an evaluation of the risk that’s being addressed.” These address standard requirements that are known candidates for retirement, corrections to existing standards or stakeholder feedback regarding a specific risk, and comprise the remaining eight active projects. 

Asked by Maggy Powell of Amazon Web Services about the expectations for progress by medium-priority standards development teams, Oswald confirmed that these projects have the same level of legal, engineering and compliance support from NERC as high-priority projects. The main differences are that these efforts do not have a set timeline and may have to wait to post their standards for ballot and comment periods if high-priority projects also are up for posting. 

Vicki O’Leary of Eversource Energy asked how NERC manages to keep the members of the low- and medium-priority project drafting teams engaged. In response, Director of Standards Development Jamie Calderon acknowledged that this topic is “a real concern” for the ERO, noting that “over a period of time, people need to come and go, and the longer that period of time is extended, the more people that might apply to.” 

Project Votes

Calderon observed that O’Leary’s question provided a “great segue” to the first standards action on the committee’s agenda. This item asked members to approve the solicitation of nominations to supplement the SDT for Project 2017-01 (Modifications to BAL-003 — Phase II), a low-priority project to revise BAL-003-2 (Frequency response and frequency bias setting). 

Calderon explained that the project had to pause along with other low- and medium-priority projects in 2023 because of the high volume of high-priority projects. During the hiatus, three team members departed the project. NERC proposed the solicitation of new members to fill these vacancies, with a focus on expertise in synchronous and asynchronous generation operations, along with representation from the Texas Interconnection and areas with high levels of inverter-based resources. The proposal passed with no objections. 

Members next tackled a similar proposal to supplement the SDT for Project 2023-07 (Transmission system planning performance requirements for extreme weather). The project is in its second phase, developing a standard to provide long-term planning requirements for normal and extreme natural events, gas-electric interdependencies and events involving distributed energy resources. 

Manager of Standards Development Sandhya Madan explained that of the SDT’s 12 original members, only seven could return for the second phase because of “competing work requirements.” NERC wishes to solicit replacements for the five who could not participate. This proposal also passed unanimously. 

The final standards item called on the SC to reject a standard authorization request that was assigned to Project 2021-03 (CIP-002 Phase Two). This SAR was intended to address a threat to grid cybersecurity posed by communications protocol converters, but the project’s SDT determined, based on industry comments, that the SAR did not clearly define the reliability risks involved and that the request did not match the scope of the project in any case. The team recommended that the SC reject the SAR with written feedback to its creator. 

This proposal also passed unanimously, though Marty Hostler of the Northern California Power Agency noted that the SAR was assigned to the team in 2023 and asked why it took so long for the team to recommend its rejection. Calderon replied that at the time, the team was also working on a high-priority SAR and did not have time to review comments on the new SAR until that work was completed.