The Texas Reliability Entity on Wednesday bid farewell to CEO Lane Lanford, Chair Fred Day and Director Delores Etter during the regional entity’s annual meeting.
The virtual format frustrated incoming CEO Jim Albright, who lamented not being able to rub shoulders one last time with outgoing board members.
“This sucks,” Albright said. “The next time we meet together, you need to come to the meeting so we can have a proper sendoff.”
Albright and other board members took turns honoring the departing officials for their tenure with Texas RE in what Lanford said “looks suspiciously like a roast.”
“You created an environment for all of us to be successful,” Albright told Lanford, who served as the Texas Public Utility Commission’s executive director for 17 years after leaving the banking industry.
Lanford joined Texas RE in 2010, becoming CEO two years later, “fortunately for us,” Albright said, crediting him with growing the entity as a separate extension of ERCOT.
Day, who served two terms as chair during his 10 years on the board, reviewed Texas RE’s accomplishments during 2020. They included a third extension of its contract with NERC; a 10-year lease at a cheaper, less congested location in Austin; and the Nomination Committee filling two independent directors’ positions on the board and choosing Albright to replace Lanford. (See Texas RE Names Albright as New CEO.)
“Jim is well prepared for this. He’s been training for an opportunity like this,” Day said.
Day and Etter also credited Lanford with helping to improve the REs’ relationship with NERC.
“Our relationship at the NERC level is much better than it was 10 years ago, I can assure you,” Day said during the board’s meeting, which followed the annual meeting and Member Representatives Committee (MRC) session.
“We have a lot more say about what happens than we did 10 years ago. And it’s not that people didn’t listen 10 years ago. I just think we have more influence, if you will, on the final outcome of what is going to be done,” he said. “I think one of the main reasons for that is people like Lane Lanford and others who have worked with NERC … trying to convince them that the only way for [the ERO Enterprise] to really work the way it should work, and the way it needs to work, is to build some trust.”
Etter agreed. “I think Lane had a lot to do with kind of organizing the other heads of the [regional] entities and doing it in a very professional, respectful way,” she said. “I know when I was on the NERC board [2004-2005], there was not any people from the entities that sat at the head table, and one of things Lane did was change that.”
Albright, who joined Texas RE in 2013 and was previously the COO, said he was honored to be leading the organization. “[The staff] gets all the credit for us continuing to do what we do [and] the consistency we’ve had over the years,” Albright said.
“I think way back to January of this year; it seems like a long time ago. We were thinking we were going to execute the plan that was in place but in March; we were faced with something completely different,” Lanford said. “I’m sure a lot of things we’ve done this year will be carried forward in new workplan. There were a lot of positives that came out of this.”
Lanford pointed to the increase in workshop participation and the ability for staff to perform their work remotely, thanks to Texas RE’s home office setups.
“That’s paid off, because we haven’t missed a beat,” he said.
MRC Meeting
The MRC met briefly in the morning, reviewing staff’s quarterly reports and regulatory updates.
ERCOT’s Christine Hasha, who chairs the grid operator’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Working Group, reminded members that CIP-008-6 (Cyber Security-Incident Reporting and Response Planning) takes effect on Jan. 1.
Texas RE’s outreach effort has been 100% virtual since March, staff said. Still, webinars and workshops attracted more than 2,300 participants this year, almost double the number reached in each of the previous two years.
The RE has a net increase of 10 members entering 2021 for a total of 110. The generation segment increased by 12 members, to total 68, but cooperative membership dropped by two, to 11.
Oncor’s Eric Shaw told the MRC that he will chair the NERC Standards Review Forum’s reliability, security and compliance efforts in 2021, with ERCOT’s Matt Stout serving as vice chair.
Return of In-person Meetings
Albright said the Texas RE is hoping for a return to in-person meetings in April, saying its original planned January return is not realistic. There will be no on-site audits until people are comfortable with them, he added.
“Obviously, we’re concerned about everyone’s healthy and safety,” Albright said. “We don’t want to push things too quickly.”
Lanford said the RE’s new, more spacious offices will be near ERCOT’s. “We can’t create any kind of social distancing” in its current office, he said. Working from the office is voluntary and limited to 50% of the total staff.
Change to Annual Meeting?
The board approved Vice Chair Milton Lee as chair to replace Day and newcomer Suzanne Spaulding as vice chair. Spaulding is joining the board as an independent director for a three-year term beginning Jan. 1. (See “Committee Selects Ex-DHS, CIA Counsel as Director,” Texas Reliability Entity Briefs: Sept. 3, 2020.)
In one of his final actions, Day urged the board to consider changing its bylaws to move the annual meeting to February from December.
“We have so many other things we need to get done at the December meeting,” Day said. “It’s not quite as busy in February … and also it would be nice to have a recap of the full year rather than doing a report in December. Hopefully, that’s something that, Milton, you and others can make happen.”
Corporate Goals Added to Work Plan
In his report to the board, Albright said he was adding four corporate goals to the annual work plan priorities document: integrating “the realization of ERO transformation aspirations”; intentional engagement with stakeholders; enhancing the information technology and security program; and promoting diversity and inclusion.
Albright said he will report to the board quarterly on progress in meeting the goals. He told the board he would “let you know if there’s any issues going on where we might not be making key objectives for the year. If we’ve already hit it in the second quarter, we’re going to let you know that too,” he said.
Albright said engaging with stakeholders will be particularly important next year because of the continuation of remote or hybrid operations from the coronavirus pandemic.
“New entrants to our region, when we sign new people up, we’re going to get out there in front of them. We want to meet them. We don’t want the first time that they talk to us [to be] when we go out to audit them. We want it to be up front. We want to engage with them and let them know how we can help them.”
He also said he wants to “create a cybersecurity awareness outside of the compliance area.”
“We’re not talking about compliance; we’re just talking about best practices: spreading information with the industry participants. We’re looking to be able to leverage our relationship with the [Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center], and the best way we can do that is to make sure it’s outside of the compliance space.”
Distribution Provider Survey
Joseph Younger, director of enforcement, reliability standards and registration, briefed the board on the RE’s survey of its 37 distribution providers, the first such survey since 2015.
Younger said the survey was in keeping with the ERO’s risk-based approach by determining whether each of the distribution providers were properly registered.
“Can you be registered in a different way, either a distribution provider with just [underfrequency load shedding] or taken off the registry altogether?” Younger asked. He said the preliminary review indicates “a number of entities are likely to be deregistered or have their registration footprint reduced.”
“It will help us in the long run to really streamline all of the areas of our program because this is really the foundation for every engagement, every enforcement activity. All those touchpoints start here.”
Expanding Resource Adequacy Beyond Peak
Director of Reliability Services Mark Henry told the board the RE is “going to look very good” in this year’s NERC Long Term Reliability Assessment (LTRA) “compared with previous years.”
“We did very well this summer with what [resources] we had; how that will shape up in the future, I don’t know,” he said. “We want the LTRA to look at a lot more than peak adequacy. We also want to start thinking about different ways to measure that. … There’s a consideration of a market-based resource adequacy measure going on in our region. There’s also consideration of different approaches that are used in other parts of the world. So, you’re going to see a lot of discussion about that over the next year, I believe.”
