Members of the Operating Reliability Subcommittee (ORS) last week appeared to reach consensus on the need for an emergency conference call procedure for reliability coordinators to supplement the existing NERC hotline.

John Norden, director of operations for ISO-NE, shared a draft of the procedure with the committee before the meeting.

“This is something independent of the NERC hotline procedure. It’s for those situations like what we had in the January [oscillation] event where it might not be appropriate for the operators to get on a NERC hotline call and have a discussion because either they’re too busy taking a tactical response to what’s going on [or] we need a more strategic discussion that might involve management staff at the [reliability coordinator] level.”

Norden said the procedure would include a roster of primary and alternate contacts for the RCs and could be triggered by an RC or NERC. The call would be led by NERC’s director of situational awareness, currently James Merlo, vice president of reliability risk management. Testing of the system would be conducted about twice a year.

There is a list of potential “triggers” for the emergency call, along with a catch-all: “any other threats to the” bulk electric system, Norden said.

ORS Chair Chris Pilong, of PJM, said it would have been good to have had such a procedure in place during the 2014 polar vortex, when as much as 22% of his RTO’s generation was out of service.

“I personally see value in having something like this,” said Pilong, the RTO’s director of dispatch. “We have similar procedures internal to PJM to be able to set up conference calls with our members — or even just internally with support staff — to get the right people from the right departments in place. Having it there ready and tested — to me it’s a great thing to have.”

Norden noted the GridEx drills have included “these fake management calls where there’s no protocol, no procedure, no way for us to get together if it was real life. … This could potentially do that.”

Pilong said the ORS members will discuss the draft proposal with their companies and may recommend the plan to the Operating Committee at the next ORS meeting in November.

SPP RC Update

SPP’s Bryan Wood told the committee that a 21-member certification team visited the RTO and conducted interviews and viewed demonstrations in August as part of its bid to expand its RC function to the Western Interconnection. The team was led by the Western Electricity Coordinating Council and included staff from FERC, NERC and the Midwest Reliability Organization.

Wood said the visit included a demonstration of SPP’s training and its “desk readiness,” Wood said. (See Certification Team Checks SPP’s Western RC Function.)

“We came out of that with some things that needed to get done, most of which were already on the project plan,” he said. A smaller group from the certification team is planning a half-day follow-up visit on Oct. 9.

SPP is scheduled to begin shadow operations with outgoing RC Peak Reliability on Oct. 7 and begin live services on Dec. 3.

Dynamic Transfer Reference Document Endorsed

The committee endorsed the Dynamic Transfer Reference Document, which provides guidance on the procedures for parties involved in dynamic transfers.

Unlike pseudo-ties, which are accounted for by all parties as actual interchange, dynamic schedules are accounted for as scheduled interchange.

The document describes the factors to be considered when determining which type of dynamic transfer should be used and includes a table comparing balancing authority obligations for different situations under dynamic schedules versus pseudo-ties.

The Operating Committee, meeting in Minneapolis, also approved the document this week.

— Rich Heidorn Jr.