By Amanda Durish Cook
CARMEL, Ind. — MISO last week said preparations are in the works for the 2021 GridEx VI exercise, with the RTO drawing on lessons learned during last year’s event.
Speaking at a Reliability Subcommittee meeting Thursday, MISO outage coordinator Trevor Hines said the RTO is already selecting internal committees to design scenarios and lead GridEx VI simulations.
“GridEx planning never stops. We’ve always got to improve with these things, right? We got a good baseline in 2019; 2021 will give us an opportunity to improve even more,” he told stakeholders.
Hines said MISO’s 2019 exercise saw a jump in interest and attendees: “We went from roughly 80 players in 2017 to over 110 in 2019.” The biennial NERC-sponsored GridEx took place Nov. 13-14, giving MISO and members the opportunity to train for “fuel shortages, loss of control center functionality, physical and cyberattacks, and a compromised back office.”
MISO last year coordinated with local law enforcement and had the Carmel Police Department on-site at its headquarters during simulations.
“We used GridEx as an opportunity to test their bomb-sniffing dog,” Hines said of the 2019 training. “We had failures; we were making decisions and there was talk of evacuating in the scenario and how that works when there’s law enforcement on-site examining suspicious packages.”
Hines said for the 2021 event, MISO will focus at least one scenario on who has the authority to order an evacuation at the RTO and how it’s conducted.
He said after the 2017 exercise, it was difficult to coordinate after-the-fact with MISO members to gather suggestions for improvement. For 2019, MISO created a survey to collect suggestions for improvement in real time, allowing it to compile a list of suggestions to improve the 2021 exercise.
Hines also said MISO last year doubled the four hours that RTO executives were required to attend GridEx training. “In 2019, we made them squeal a little and made them participate for a full eight hours,” he said.
MISO will host the national kickoff meeting for GridEx VI in September at its Carmel headquarters.
