Stakeholders voiced concern Wednesday that WECC will move too fast and cut too deep with a plan to sweepingly reform its stakeholder committee structure, while company officials attempted to assure them that the proposal is only meant to launch an “iterative” process that will rely heavily on member input.

WECC’s Stakeholder Engagement Task Force (SETF) on Oct. 19 issued a straw proposal that would consolidate or replace most of the regional entity’s standing committees while eliminating subcommittees not actively engaged in vital work projects. (See Plan Would Consolidate, Cull WECC Stakeholder Groups.)

Stakeholder comments on the proposal are due by Nov. 2, with the SETF presenting a progress report to the WECC Board of Directors during its December meeting.

“The process is just basically too short. The details of the proposal you’ve provided don’t really present the members time to be able to come up with some really good suggestions, as you were requesting,” Charles Faust, real-time merchant manager at the Western Area Power Administration and chair of WECC’s Market Interface Committee (MIC), said during a call to discuss the proposal Wednesday.

Faust was speaking on behalf of members of the MIC, which is on the chopping block under the plan, along with WECC’s Operating Committee. The functions of both committees would effectively be combined into a new Operations, Security and Market Interface Committee (OSMIC). Among WECC’s existing standing committees, only the Reliability Assessment Committee (RAC) would remain because its work aligns with the RE’s long-term strategy and reliability risk priorities, the SETF said in its proposal.

Faust said MIC members feel their committee is “still relevant” and are concerned that their voices would be “diluted” under the proposed structure.

MIC members seek an extension of time to comment on the proposal, Faust said, or at least want WECC to solicit a second round of comments that will allow for more considered opinions after the SETF has provided more background on how it arrived at its proposal.

“I’m just wondering if it would be possible to take advantage of the work that was done by the team to provide the ideas and interpretations you had for the proposal to be shared so that the members and stakeholders would be able to glean from that some additional ideas and possibly put forth some recommendations, instead of just putting forth comment,” Faust said.

MIC members also have questions about a provision of the plan that calls for membership in both the OSMIC and the RAC to be limited to a fixed number of stakeholders with members serving staggered terms.

“What does limited membership look like?” Faust said, adding that MIC members want more specifics on that aspect of the plan, including actual numbers.

“By reducing the members, some feel you could be limiting the resources you could draw on,” he said.

The MIC also had doubts about the proposal’s plan to replace the Joint Guidance Committee with a new Performance Review Board responsible for establishing and monitoring performance and stakeholder metrics to gauge the output and effectiveness of standing committee projects.

“With the Performance Review Board reviewing everything, our concern is that could be a very heavy lift for them, and will they have time to fully address all the work from all the committees?” Faust said.

He noted that the new structure “could limit the ability of the exploration of issues” for an industry that is very “dynamic and in flux.”

“Not all issues need to develop work products. Sometimes it’s just a matter of exploring it to see if there is something there or not,” he said.

Faust also posed the question: “What is the structural problem that you’re trying to fix?”

‘A Little Vague’

Jordan White, WECC vice president for strategic engagement, said the SETF proposal attempts to address a problem identified by the working group charged with making periodic reviews of WECC’s governance and structure: “I think just the idea that … there was diminished participation from certain stakeholders.”

White said the working group found the standing committees generally suffered from a “lack of direction” despite the “incredible amount of potential” among their members.

“The end-state of where we want to be is this robust, agile, really engaged group where people are really focusing on working on problems,” White said, adding that the straw proposal is really intended to determine what “vehicle” WECC needs to arrive at that goal.

White acknowledged that the SETF is still not clear on what it will present to the board in December; it could include stakeholder comments or an “overarching principle” around how to proceed.

“We don’t have the process all buttoned up now. … It’s going to be iterative,” said Victoria Ravenscroft, WECC’s senior policy and external affairs manager. It would not serve WECC to be “draconian” about the proposal, she said. “We get that the [comments] time is short, but really we see this as the opening of a conversation.”

The only timeline the board provided is that the SETF provide “preliminary findings” around the committee restructuring in December, she said. “It is a little vague,” she added.

“I really appreciate the vagueness of the board directive. … I think WECC should take advantage of that,” said Lorissa Jones-Cardoza, transmission reliability program manager at the Bonneville Power Administration and a member of WECC’s Member Advisory Committee. She pointed out that it took WECC stakeholders more than a year to evaluate the restructuring of the RAC.

“Allowing MIC and the OC two weeks to come up with this proposal is really, I believe, a big disservice to WECC and the stakeholders and the products that are produced,” she said.

“In terms of WECC staff, we take this very seriously and wouldn’t do something to alienate our partners in this,” Ravenscroft replied.

Casey Johnston, director of grid operations for Montana-based Northwestern Energy, said the perspective of the OC has been valuable to his small investor-owned utility that covers a “very large geographic area.”

“The fact is that I have the ability to go to the OC meetings and I can participate, I can comment … and it seems like when [it has] a limited role [within the OSMIC], I would lose that. It would be limited representation,” Johnston said.

He also questioned the lack of representation of “operational folks” on the SETF, which is heavily populated by regulators and industry legal personnel.

“That’s something that I guess struck me when I went through the members,” he said. “They’re all very qualified; they’re all very knowledgeable, but there seems to be some knowledge and experience and perspective missing from some of the other stakeholder groups.

“It’s too late now, but going forward, I really think you need to get some more operational, maybe some merchant folks, involved in the process,” Johnston said.