QUEBEC CITY, Quebec — NERC’s Board of Trustees and Member Representatives Committee held their third-quarter meetings last week, with discussions on wireless spectrum, cybersecurity and the Electromagnetic Pulses Task Force. Here’s some of the highlights.

DOE’s Walker Updates on Spectrum Issue, Storage Legislation

Assistant Energy Secretary Bruce Walker told the board that he is working with the Department of Commerce to address utilities’ concerns over the Federal Communications Commission’s proposal to require then to share the 6-GHz wireless spectrum with unlicensed users. (See Utilities Warn of Encroachment on Communications Band.)

Walker, who heads the Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity, said he has spoken with Diane Rinaldo, deputy assistant secretary for communications and information at Commerce and “the person,” he said, “who has the relationship with the FCC through the White House.”

“Specifically, we have asked her to look at a dedicated spectrum for the utilities,” Walker said. “I’m not sure what the outcome will be.”

Walker also said he has been working with legislators to consolidate five bills on grid-scale storage into a single piece of legislation. The bills were the subject of a July 9 hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

He said DOE’s $5 million budget proposal for a grid storage “launch pad” survived the House of Representatives’ budget markup and awaits action by the Senate. The project, to be based at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, will seek chemistry-based storage technologies as an alternative to lithium and rare earth materials. “Our target is to drive down the cost significantly,” he said.

Greet REs as Allies on CIP Compliance, RF Chief Urges

ReliabilityFirst CEO Tim Gallagher began his brief appearance before the board by noting it was meeting a day after the anniversary of the 2003 blackout.

“The regions continue to see violations of the [critical infrastructure protection] standards. The penalties associated with violations of these standards are increasing — I’m sure you’ve all noticed that. This is intended to send a message. It is intended to change the behavior. But penalties are nothing compared to what happens to your company if there’s an actual attack as a result of a security breach,” he said. “We cannot enforce our way to excellence.”

Instead, Gallagher said companies should take advantage of the regional entities’ voluntary programs to help companies manage their security.

“These programs are voluntary. They’re free. I’m not aware of any company that’s been harmed from the compliance standpoint from participating in these programs. So, I implore you to take advantage of these programs. The only way we can stay ahead of our adversaries in this area is by an all-hands-on-deck approach. You need to look at us as allies, as another set of eyes.”

Diversity Focus at GridSecCon

Technology and Security Committee Chair Suzanne Keenan said the 2019 GridSecCon, scheduled for Oct. 22-25 in Atlanta, will include a focus on diversity, with a women’s networking breakfast.

“We ask that you invite, first of all, your cyber experts, but especially women and encourage them to attend,” she said.

ERO Enterprise Dashboard: Seeking More Granular Data

Director of Reliability Risk Management James Merlo gave a presentation on trends documented by the ERO Enterprise Dashboard, which tracks eight metrics.

The report found year-over-year improvements on Category 3 events (e.g., unintended loss of load or generation of 2,000 MW or more) and load losses from gas-fired outages or lack of fuel — none in either category so far this year.

Year-over-year performance was worse for protection system misoperations, unauthorized physical or electronic access, and moderate and serious risk repeat violations filed with FERC. There were three disruptions of bulk electric system operations because of physical attacks in the second quarter, including a copper wire theft and an incident in which a gun was used to shoot at the bell housings on insulators, causing a line to fall.

Vegetation encroachment violations are flat on a five-year rolling average.

Chairman Roy Thilly noted this is the first year NERC has used the dashboard and said it will consider refinements in February.

Merlo agreed the dashboard has room for improvement. For example, Metric 4 — events caused by forced outages of gas-fired unit from cold weather or gas unavailability — tracks load shed events. “It’s a pretty coarse measurement, but that’s what we have,” he said.

He said the measures of energy availability — the percentage of potential winter period production lost because of gas-fired unit outages or lack of fuel — are “kind of flatlined because we don’t have quite the granularity that we need to show whether it’s getting better or worse.”

EMP Task Force Update

Howard Gugel, director of engineering and standards, provided an update on the work of the EMP Task Force, which is scheduled to post recommendations for industry comments at the end of the month and produce a report for the board in the fourth quarter. The task force is broken into three subgroups focusing on: system planning and modeling; critical facility assessment; and mitigation, response and recovery.

Trustee Rob Manning asked what the task force will base its recommendations on. “The analysis tools, the models, are lagging,” Manning said. “They’re probably not the tools that … industry needs to do a full assessment or a full remediation.”

“That’s exactly what the [subgroups] are struggling with,” Gugel responded. “[There’s a] very limited pool of expertise that understand what the impacts are to the system from an EMP. As I’ve talked with Randy Horton [co-author of the Electric Power Research Institute EMP report in April], he said you could probably count the number of experts in the U.S. … on one hand or two hands.”

Gugel said NERC has discussed potential tools with power system modeling vendors. The E-3 pulse “looks very similar to [a geomagnetic disturbance], so the tools they’ve developed for GMD will be applicable … but the E-1 pulse is a little bit more of a concern in figuring out how exactly to model it.”

He also noted that EMP wave forms are classified. “I know that various government organizations are trying to come up with some sort of a declassified wave form that could be used. But that kind of leads into the next problem, which is … it becomes very sticky for the U.S. to be able to share something that Canada would be able to use and Canada would be able to share something the U.S. would be able to use.

“One of the other things that we’re also struggling with is, how many pulses do you deal with? Do you look at just one? Three? Four? What is the limit? The team is struggling with a lot of these concepts. They’ll make the best recommendations they possibly can, but I know this is work that will be continued throughout the next several years.”

– Rich Heidorn Jr.