“This year is our special first, and hopefully only, virtual meeting,” Kristine Hafner, (now former) WECC board chair, declared as she opened the regional entity’s annual meeting Thursday.
The meeting, typically part of a larger multiday affair hosted at a hotel in a Western city that also includes individual member class forums and a Board of Directors meeting, was this year transferred entirely to the Web in response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. (See No ‘Hiccups’ for West’s RC Transition.)
ERO Insider tuned in for much of the event. Following is some of what we heard.
‘Gently Powerful’ Hafner Steps Aside as Chair
Friday’s board meeting featured a changing of the guard, as the term-limited Hafner yielded her position as chair to former Vice Chair Ian McKay, while Richard Campbell replaced McKay.
Hafner said it had been a “privilege and pleasure” to serve as chair since 2017 and that she looked forward to continued collaboration with the board.
McKay said he could describe Hafner’s leadership style by borrowing a term he had heard elsewhere: “gently powerful.”
He noted that Hafner had led the board through a series of challenging issues, including the untimely passing of Director Armando Perez in 2017, a “sweeping” change of WECC’s bylaws, the hiring of a new CEO and — most recently — the pandemic.
“I found your leadership to be extremely effective because of your calming demeanor,” Director Richard Woodward said.
“It’s a big job, but it’s fascinating; it’s challenging; it’s such a learning experience,” Hafner said.
Future Focus
The board on Friday approved WECC’s proposed long-term strategy (LTS), which is built on the foundation of NERC’s ERO Long-Term Strategy while offering a specific Western slant. (See WECC Seeks Western Bent on Strategy Plan.)
“It really acts as our guiding star for what we aspire to be,” Jordan White, WECC vice president of strategic engagement, told members and directors during the meeting Thursday. White joined WECC early this year after serving on the Utah Public Service Commission.
“The challenges on the bulk power system have never been greater,” White said.
During Thursday’s meeting, WECC staff elaborated on each of the five focus areas of the LTS.
Speaking about focus area 1 — “innovate and expand risk-based focus in all standards, compliance monitoring and enforcement actions,” Senior Vice President of Reliability and Security Oversight Steve Goodwill said WECC’s intent is to work with registered entities to move beyond mere compliance to focus on creating “a culture of risk identification and mitigation.” The RE wants to identify and address grid risks in ways that best reflect the “uniqueness” of the Western Interconnection, and it hopes a key outcome of the focus area is that the Western viewpoints are represented and incorporated into NERC reliability standards, he said.
Branden Sudduth, vice president of reliability planning and performance, said focus area 2 zeroes in on WECC’s “core mission” of assessing and mitigating known and emerging risks.
“This focus area is meant to really ensure we’re directing our [attention] in the right area,” Sudduth said. Success in this area, he said, would mean high precision in the models WECC uses to assess risk on the BPS and exploration of different ways to assess reliability.
White said focus area 3 covers WECC’s efforts to maintain and expand relationships with “key partners” and elevate its “relevance” in the region.
“It lets the rest of the West know about the amazing work that goes on at WECC,” White said, adding that the organization should become the “gold standard” for reliability expertise in the region. “I’d really love to see public service commissioners … start asking the question, ‘What does WECC have to say about this?’”
CFO Jillian Lessner said focus area 4 is “all about effective day-to-day business operations at WECC” and keeping it fiscally sound. Lessner said WECC seeks to be a “nimble” organization, citing its ability to quickly pivot to home-based working as an example.
CEO Melanie Frye called focus area 5 — building a “capability and culture” to deliver on the reliability mission — the “cornerstone” of the LTS.
“If we really sit back and think about what WECC does, we don’t make electricity; we don’t buy or sell. The value that we add to the interconnection is all about what we can create with the resources we have, and that is our people,” Frye said.
She said WECC needs to attract the “right talent” and that she wants the organization to be considered an “employer of choice.”
“The second piece of [the focus] is putting in the energy to build partnerships with experts in the industry,” Frye said, adding that WECC will “measure our success by how we’re respected as a partner.”
COVID-19 Response
WECC will continue its “work-from-home posture” for the foreseeable future and will not provide a target for return “because we’ve had to keep extending it,” Frye told board members Friday.
“Our first priority is the health and safety of our employees,” including mental health, she said, noting that WECC works to keep in contact with staff and hold regular webinars through its employee-assistance program to help them avoid a sense of isolation.
While Frye thinks WECC has been largely successful in completing its work since the onset of the pandemic, she wanted “to emphasize that we don’t think this is a permanent solution.”
“I think we all look forward to the future when we can safely travel and reconnect again,” she said.
Align a ‘Huge Undertaking’ and ‘Opportunity’
WECC faces a “huge undertaking” in having to train 400 registered entities on NERC’s Align software, which is now slated for release in the first quarter of 2021 — a year and a half later than originally expected. (See Align Tool Set for 2021 Rollout.)
Formerly known as the Compliance Monitoring and Enforcement Program Technology Project, Align is intended to improve and standardize compliance monitoring and reporting processes across the ERO Enterprise.
“We really see the adoption of Align as a key corporate activity for 2021,” Goodwill told the board.
WECC wants members to be “very satisfied” with its work on the project, he said. “We see that as an opportunity in building our relationship with the registered entities.”
Blackout Talk
California’s recent rolling blackouts and the ongoing concern about future resource shortages in the West were among the hot topics of discussion at Friday’s board meeting. (See Theories Abound over California Blackouts Cause.)
Frye recounted that the heat wave precipitating the Aug. 14-15 blackouts drove temperatures to 15 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit above normal throughout much of the West, hindering the ability of neighboring states to export energy to California because of the need to meet their own high demand. Additionally, California’s wind generation fell off sharply, and a key gas-fired generator went offline unexpectedly.
“The California ISO was very proactive in dealing with this, making calls to other utilities,” Frye said. “I know the CEO [Steve Berberich] was getting engaged in making those calls at the CEO level to identify as many megawatts as possible [and] issuing public appeals for load reduction.”
Frye said the success of those efforts were evident during another heat wave occurring over the Labor Day weekend, when California was able to avoid load shedding despite getting to a Stage 3 emergency. (See California Avoids Blackouts amid Brutal Heat, Fires.)
“The public appeals for peak shaving were very effective, but at the end of the day, these are not the kinds of situations that we anticipate, and I don’t think any of us see this as an acceptable solution,” she said.
Frye noted that WECC will perform its own analysis of the events, “working very closely with the entities involved, as well as NERC, to identify the specific situation … and identify what can be done to improve this in the future.” (See CalCCA Seeks ‘Objective’ Review of Blackout Report.)
“It does highlight the conversation that we’ve been having in the West for the last year or so around resource adequacy, and that there does need to be a broader view of the issues,” she added.
“I was really struck by the incident itself,” Director Gary Leidich said. “I understand the weather situation and the imports, but the fact that this was during a pandemic over a weekend really causes a bit of an alarm bell to go off in terms of, ‘What’s the outlook?’
“While it’s always very interesting to talk about 2038 and long-term forecasts and such, I would really appreciate a brief summary on the outlook for the next three to five years in California, because I’m not sure it’s going to get a whole lot better,” Leidich said. “People are going to come back to work. We’re going to be in a Monday-through-Friday load picture. We’re going to shut down two units at Diablo Canyon and continue to retire thermal units, so the ramping capability will be challenged even more, I suspect.”
Vice Chair Campbell asked whether there was “any movement at NERC at all” in re-examining the assumptions in its Western long-term reliability assessment (LTRA).
“Wouldn’t NERC be interested to look at their data limitations in light of the West having to do its own thing, because we find their LTRA not sufficient and how it completely missed on this California event?” Campbell asked.
“We’ve had some conversations about the recent summer assessment that we published a few months ago, and how it did or didn’t reflect the conditions in California,” Sudduth responded. “I think the simple answer to your question is that we are definitely having those conversations and identifying ways to improve the process, and I think all of us are starting to understand some of the limitations of the data assumptions and the different types of analysis that go into the LTRA.”
Peak Windfall
The board also voted to authorize WECC to accept a $3.8 million donation from Peak Reliability, representing money left in the former reliability coordinator’s accounts after it settled obligations in the wake of its dissolution last year.
Peak’s bylaws required it to donate any leftover funds to a nonprofit, Goodwill explained to the board. The RC, formerly part of WECC before bifurcation separated the two in 2014, chose to turn over the largesse to its former parent organization.
While FERC must still approve WECC’s acceptance of the money, Goodwill encouraged the board to approve the transfer before filing to obtain permission to accept the funds and determine how they can be spent.
Goodwill said FERC could authorize WECC to treat the donation as statutory funds (with money directed for the RE’s core operations) because it had provided Peak with about $7.8 million in start-up funds to facilitate bifurcation. He said WECC would set aside up to $300,000 of the money to cover any trailing requests for payment from Peak.
