By Rich Heidorn Jr.

A senior NERC official suggested Wednesday that Standards Committee members could jeopardize the Electric Reliability Organization’s effort to win recertification by balking at inclusion of ERO staff on standard drafting teams.

“One of the things that is important for not just our process but also for our accreditation with ANSI [the American National Standards Institute] is that we have a completely open process; that it be open to all participants,” said Howard Gugel, NERC vice president of engineering and standards. “I’m concerned that some actions that … this committee has taken over the last couple months are beginning to get a little bit close to a line that you may not want to tread closely to, especially in a time when we’re trying to do our ANSI accreditation.”

Gugel made his comments after some committee members attempted to block a regional entity official from the standard authorization request (SAR) drafting team on a cold-weather standard requested by FERC and NERC (Project 2019-06). He responded after Dominion Energy’s Sean Bodkin offered a motion to remove the official — identified as only “Candidate 6” — from the team.

“This is a philosophical issue for me. I don’t think the people who enforce the rule should be making the rules,” said Bodkin, Dominion’s NERC compliance policy manager. “Having an individual from the ERO actually participating in voting and drafting rather than supporting development of the standards isn’t really appropriate.”

Bodkin also said the candidate was ill-suited for the team because he had been an auditor for 11 years “and hadn’t actually been out in the field dealing with cold-weather issues.”

FERC and NERC called for the standard in their joint report on the January 2018 cold weather event that caused MISO and SPP to seek voluntary load reductions and nearly forced load shedding in MISO South. Many NERC stakeholders, however, have questioned the need for a standard. (See Gen Operators Cool to Winter Preparedness Standard.)

Gugel insisted there was no risk of “undue influence” by the official, noting that any standard would be subject to votes by NERC stakeholders, the Board of Trustees and FERC. “It’s different than other regulations,” he said.

He said including RE officials on SDTs is a response to “consistent feedback from the Standards Efficiency Review advisory group and [Members Representatives Committee] that we need more compliance input into standards development and specifically in the standard drafting team.”

Bodkin said RE officials should participate but should not have a vote on drafting teams. “ERO isn’t part of industry. It’s industry oversight, and the team should be made up of industry members,” he said.

NERC attorney Lauren A. Perotti responded that “there is no requirement [in NERC rules] that standard drafting teams be members of industry,” noting that the team that developed the geomagnetic disturbance standard included a NASA space scientist.

“I also wanted to point out that regional entities do in fact vote on standards,” she added, noting that the REs are one of 10 sectors represented on the Standards Committee. “That is why Guy and Steve are with us today,” she said, referring to committee members Guy Zito, assistant vice president of standards for the Northeast Power Coordinating Council, and Steve Rueckert, director of standards for the Western Electricity Coordinating Council.

Bodkin’s motion to remove the RE official from the candidate slate failed by a voice vote, and the committee ultimately approved the complete slate.

Bodkin and others prevailed, however, in their bid to block reconsideration of the committee’s vote in November to reject a consultant from Utility Services Inc. from a drafting team considering changes to PRC-005-6 (Project 2019-04). (See “Consultants Removed from SDT Nominee List,” NERC Standards Committee Briefs: Nov. 20, 2019.)

Standards Committee Chair Andrew Gallo said members may have voted based on “false information.” He said Bodkin incorrectly said the committee’s nominee selection criteria only allow consultants on SDTs if they bring technical expertise that no other team members have.

“The actual criteria is that the person be a subject matter expert … and clearly we think that this person meets that criterion,” Gallo said.

Gallo also said some smaller entities unable to assign their own staff to SDTs use consultants as a “proxy.”

“We thought we should try to be sensitive to the needs of these small entities,” he said.

Gugel confirmed that NERC had vetted the consultant and found him qualified to serve on the team.

Need to Review Criteria

The meeting ended with an agreement that the Standards Committee Process Subcommittee, which is chaired by Bodkin, will review the criteria for team membership.

“We seem to be revisiting criteria for standard drafting team appointments frequently,” said Jennifer Flandermeyer, director of federal regulatory policy for Evergy, who said the review would provide “opportunities for us to align thinking.”

“There’s a lot of things for us to balance and a lot of things to be considered,” she continued, citing the Standards Development Process Participant Conduct Policy, which prohibits participants from using the process for “commercial purposes … including, but not limited to, advertising or promoting a specific product or service.”

“We’ve had a lot of dialogue about what does ‘commercial benefit’ represent from the vendor/consultant community. How they benefit from that participation I think needs to be vetted out further. There are some really potential politically charged, tough conversations that we’ve got to have to make sure that we as the Standards Committee, working with NERC, get this right.”

Evidence Retention

The committee also endorsed the recommendations by a Standards Efficiency Review sub-team to reduce NERC’s evidence-retention schemes to five from more than 50. An earlier draft of the recommendations had suggested eight schemes. (See “Evidence Retention Report Posted for Comment,” Standards Committee Briefs: Aug. 21, 2019.)

Susan Morris, of the FERC Office of Electric Reliability (OER), asked whether the team had considered evidence-retention requirements of other regulatory bodies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Michael Puscas of ISO-NE said the team did not look. “The rationale for that was this is something that is directly related to the NERC standards and that looking at evidence retention outside of the NERC standards world didn’t seem to apply. It was apples to oranges in our estimation.”

Morris also said OER preferred NERC require the retention of evidence for the full period between audits.

Puscas said only some of the schemes would require such retention periods. “When you get into the rolling evidence-retention schemes, that would not apply because some audits are greater than a 36-month period,” he said.

“If you’re a generation owner or generator operator, you may have to keep it for six or seven years or longer” under such a requirement, said Gallo, of Austin Energy. “The idea that you would have to keep it back to the last audit is crazy. That’s me, not Austin Energy, talking.”

It was the last meeting for Gallo as chair of the committee. He will be replaced by Amy Casuscelli of Xcel Energy.

Other Actions

In other action, the committee:

• approved the committee’s 2020-2022 Strategic Work Plan;
• endorsed its 2019 Annual Accomplishments;
• authorized the posting of proposed reliability standards CIP-004-7 and CIP-011-3 to clarify the requirements related to managing access to and securing bulk electric system (BES) cyber system information (Project 2019-02);
• accepted modifications to the SAR for PER-003-2 (Project 2019-05);
• appointed Dean LaForest of ISO-NE as chair of the SDT to revise the requirements for determining and communicating system operating limits (Project 2015-09); and
• approved a correction of a typographical error in proposed reliability standard BAL-003-2 on frequency response requirements (Project 2017-01).