NERC’s Bulk Power System Awareness Team on Thursday gave stakeholders a presentation on their role as the ERO’s “eyes and ears.”
“We collect data, analyze the data and report on the data,” Bill Graham, principal bulk system awareness coordinator, said during NERC’s eighth annual Monitoring and Situational Awareness Technical Conference, held via WebEx. “We’re continuously observing system conditions and using various tools that we have, as well as expertise, [to] try to identify any kind of threats.”
Graham gave his presentation after an update by Wei Qiu, senior engineer of event analysis, on trends in NERC’s energy management system outage data.
The seven-member Bulk Power System Awareness Team, part of NERC’s Reliability Risk Management department, has an average of 22 years of experience. It is headed by Director Darrell Moore, a former transmission operator for Georgia Power.
In addition to Graham, who received nuclear training in the U.S. Navy, it includes senior engineer Mani Mardhekar, a former power trader and analyst of bulk power system operations; senior analysts Ara Johns, a former generation dispatcher for Southern Co., and Brent Kane, a former reliability coordinator for PJM; Tony Burt, former supervisor of reliability coordination operations at Peak RC; and administrative assistant Stephanie Lawrence, who holds a degree in information technology.
In addition to issuing about a dozen special reports annually, the team provides a report each morning that is circulated to NERC CEO Jim Robb, FERC, the regional entities and some reliability coordinators. “It’s a description of what we’ve seen … threats that are potentially in place against the bulk power system, as well as any kind of weather events or anything of the like that needs to be at the forefront of everyone’s mind,” Graham said.
It also collects the EOP-004 disturbance reports filed daily by regulated entities.
“What my team does is the initial triage of these events to understand if there’s an immediate concern,” Graham said. It also files the information into databases used for event analysis and Lessons Learned reports.
But it is not involved with any compliance monitoring, Graham emphasized. “We do file the mandatory EOP-004 reports into the NERC database … but we don’t provide any kind of comment or input with regard to any compliance monitoring issues,” he said. “We steer clear of that 100%. If compliance ever does become an issue, we stop the conversation and get the correct parties involved. We just simply are not part of the compliance regulatory arm of NERC.”
The team has a variety of what Graham called “nifty tools,” including OSIsoft’s PI Vision, which tracks system frequency, and SAFNR v.3 (Situational Awareness for Situational Awareness Tool Nears Rollout.)
It also uses Genscape, which collects power prices and uses sensors to monitor transmission line loads.
Although it is largely used by power traders, “we use it to understand the health and wellbeing of the bulk power system,” said Graham, showing a screen shot from a day when he said there were “buying opportunities” in MISO.
“What my team does is we see this and try to understand why. Why is there a buying opportunity up in the Michigan area? Is there a plant that’s in a forced outage? Is there transmission congestion?”
The group also monitors “all the social media and news websites that you can imagine. So, for example we keep an eye on all the utility websites, all the reliability coordinator websites [and] all the balancing authority information that’s publicly available,” Graham said. “Likewise, we keep a close eye on social media. We do not participate, but we do watch what’s being talked about.”
And because NERC is a nonprofit organization, Graham said, “we make the best use of any single free Internet tool that’s available.”
“So, we’ve become experts at all the different weather websites,” he said. “Hurricanes are a huge deal for us.”
