ORLANDO, Fla. — NERC’s Planning Committee acted on three reliability guidelines during meetings June 4-5, prompting SPP’s Shannon Mickens to ask how standards enforcement officials will treat entities that do not choose to follow them.

He noted that the guidelines state that ERO Enterprise Compliance Monitoring and Enforcement Program (CMEP) staff will give examples endorsed in such documents “deference when conducting compliance monitoring activities.”

“You say this is one way to meet your compliance. So, doesn’t an entity technically have to adopt that document?” Mickens asked.

Tim Fritch, vice chair of the Synchronized Measurements Subcommittee, said he shared Mickens’ concern. “We have gone round and round on this,” Fritch said. “So, if I don’t follow this, am I in compliance or not? … I guess the other way to do it is to try and cover every aspect [of compliance in the guidance document] and that’s” unrealistic.

PC Chair Brian Evans-Mongeon said entities should take up such questions with their regional entity’s compliance department. “There’s no way an implementation guidance document will answer every question,” he said. “We already know there are regional differences from time to time on subject matters, so your region may be willing to consider it differently than others.”

Evans-Mongeon also said the PC can submit implementation guidance to the compliance monitoring group. “So, if people have particular items that they would like to have passed on through, we’d be happy to assign it to a group and take a look at it.”

The chair also said that at its next meeting, the PC Executive Committee will consider creating a schedule for reviewing and updating existing guidelines about every three years.

Voting Actions

The committee:

• Approved the application guide for Modeling Turbine-Governor and Active Power-Frequency Controls in Stability Studies to ensure turbine-governor models produce accurate angular stability, frequency stability and primary frequency response simulations. Applicable to: generator owners (GOs), generator operators (GOPs), transmission planners (TPs), planning coordinators (PCs) and power plant modelers as well as balancing authorities, transmission operators (TOPs) and reliability coordinators when performing stability studies.
• Authorized posting of reliability guideline DER_A Model Parameterization for a 45-day comment period. The guideline is intended to avoid incorrect parameters that can prevent the DER model from capturing the frequency, voltage or trip settings needed to represent system performance accurately. Applicable to: PCs, TPs, TOPs and RCs.
• Authorized posting of Improvements to Interconnection Requirements for BPS-Connected Inverter-Based Resources for a 45-day comment period. The posting also was approved this week by the Operating Committee. (See related story, “IRPTF Scope Document Remanded,” Operating Committee Briefs: June 4-5, 2019.)
• Approved the Modeling Notifications process document, which explains the work of the System Analysis Modeling Subcommittee. The process allows SAMS to receive modeling information from power system modeling subject matter experts and simulation tool users and develop modeling notifications as needed.
• Approved the Electric-Gas Working Group scope. The group will initially focus on developing guidance or guidelines for considering fuel-related risks in planning studies and system analysis.

Philosophical Question on Inverter-based Resources

ERCOT’s Jeff Billo, vice chair of the Inverter-based Resource Performance Task Force (IRPTF), raised what he called a “philosophical” question posed by the challenges of asynchronous generation displacing synchronous machines.

“As we move forward to more and more inverter-based generation, do we need to require the inverter-based generators to behave more like synchronous machines or do we change our philosophy of how we operate the system and make the system more accommodating to inverter-based [machines]?” he asked. He said he had not settled on an answer.

Billo cited studies showing that the grid cannot run on 100% “grid-following” inverters, whose control systems rely on strong 60-Hz signals from synchronous machines. “I really don’t like the term ‘grid forming’ inverter technology but that seems to be becoming the buzz phrase that people are using,” he said.

“You really need some of those to be grid-forming inverters. … I don’t think we’re at a point where we can specify technically what grid-forming means but there’s a lot of good discussion going on about that.”

Battery and Energy Storage Workshop Planned

NERC, the North America Generation Forum and the Energy Systems Integration Group are planning a workshop on battery and energy storage in September or October, John Moura, NERC director of reliability assessment, told the committee.

Chair Evans-Mongeon said the goal of the workshop will be to identify the impact of storage on the bulk power system and determine “if there is something of growing significance that warrants our attention.”

“I’m told there are two 400-MW battery systems that are slated for the West to come online this year. There is another proposal that I just saw earlier this week for a 1,000-MW compressed gas storage facility in the salt caverns of Utah,” he added.

Billo said that a workshop the Texas grid operator held on the subject in April attracted the biggest crowd of any stakeholder event in the last 10 years. “So, there’s a lot of interest,” he said. (See “Workshops Discuss Storage, Inverter-based Resources,” ERCOT Briefs: Week of April 22, 2019.)

Moura said the NERC session will likely be in D.C., with web access.

PC Chair Re-elected; MOD-32 SAR Reviewers Appointed

Evans-Mongeon (Utility Services) was re-elected as PC chair for a two-year term. Joe Sowell (Georgia Transmission) was elected vice chair, replacing Noman Williams (GridLiance).

Evans-Mongeon and Sowell also were appointed as reviewers for the System Planning Impacts from Distributed Energy Resources Working Group’s (SPIDERWG) draft standard authorization request to revise MOD-032-1 (Data for Power System Modeling and Analysis) to improve modeling of DER in planning studies.

Joining them will be Billo; Jason Spitzkoff (Arizona Public Service); Carl Turner (Florida Municipal Power Agency); Wayne Guttormson (SaskPower); Christine Ericson (Illinois Commerce Commission); Phil Fedora (NPCC); and Enoch Davies (WECC).

The current standard addresses the collection of modeling data for interconnection-wide base cases but has no provisions regarding DER data. The SAR proposes to include data requirements and reporting procedures for DER and replace the term load-serving entity with distribution provider (DP) because of the removal of LSEs from the NERC registry criteria.

Electronic Vote Set for PRC SAR

The committee will conduct an electronic vote on a SAR to amend PRC-019-2 (Coordination of Generating Unit or Plant Capabilities, Voltage Regulating Controls, and Protection) to address distributed power resources.

The standard, which addresses the reliability issue of miscoordination between generator capability, control systems, and protection functions, was developed for synchronous generation and “does not sufficiently outline the requirements for all generation resource types,” the SAR says. The initiative would seek to correct or clarify issues regarding synchronous generation to remove ambiguity.

Member Roundtable

In the member’s roundtable that closed the meeting, Williams and Turner expressed concern about the ERO’s ability to keep up with the accelerating rate of change in the industry. “Some of it’s driven internally, but I think a lot of it is driven by policymakers that are making decisions that are forcing us to do things that drive change, but they also stretch reliability and resiliency,” Williams said.

Turner noted the increasing involvement of manufacturers in NERC’s process as a result of changing technology. NERC should not stifle innovation, he said, but it must take the time to ensure that new technologies are properly vetted. “We have a duty, first and foremost, of providing safe, reliable power,” he said. “And we can’t just have it be a gold rush here: Some people got rich; some people got hurt. … I worry about that. Let’s stay vigilant as we try to keep up with all this.”