In its monthly meeting on Wednesday, NERC’s Standards Committee came close to rejecting the standard authorization request (SAR) for Project 2019-04 (Modifications to reliability standard PRC-005-6) before agreeing to give the project’s team more time to address complaints raised by industry stakeholders in multiple formal comment periods.

NERC initiated Project 2019-04 in May 2019 in response to a proposal from the North American Generator Forum (NAGF), which felt that the current standard does not clearly explain its applicability to protective functions within automatic voltage regulators (AVR) or prescribe appropriate maintenance activities for these devices.

The SAR drafting team has posted the draft request for industry comments three times and met serious pushback each time. Most notably, NAGF, despite providing the initial impetus for the project, has since backed off, saying after the second round that the updated SAR has “expanded the scope significantly from the original wording of the NAGF SAR and evolved into a draft that the NAGF can no longer support.” (See AVR Standards Team Faces Industry Pushback.)

This objection was clearly bothering consultant Philip Winston, who at Wednesday’s meeting mentioned NAGF’s withdrawal of support and other stakeholders’ concerns about the potential of the project to impact other standards beyond PRC-005-6. Winston also pointed out that while the drafting team acknowledged the negative comments, it did not seem to have addressed them at all in the latest round of revisions.

“In responses to comments, many of [them were], ‘Well, it will be up to the standard drafting team [SDT] to determine the direction.’ But it’s the same people, and they know where they’re going, in my opinion,” Winston said, referring to the proposal before the committee to appoint the SAR drafting team as the SDT (while soliciting one additional member). “I just don’t think that the industry … has a legitimate opportunity to continue to express their concerns on the direction this project has gone” unless the team undertakes further revisions and another comment period.

Multiple participants agreed with Winston that the SAR drafting team had not been fully responsive to industry concerns. John Babik, director of electric compliance at JEA — a publicly owned electric, water and sewer utility in Jacksonville, Fla. — even went so far as to move that the committee reject the SAR, which would close the project entirely.

There is recent precedent for ending a standard project over failure to address industry comments. The committee voted at its December meeting to reject the SAR for Project 2020-01 (Modifications to MOD-032-1) for essentially the same reason. (See NERC Standards Committee Briefs: Dec. 9, 2020.)

In this case members opted not to take such an extreme step just yet; Babik withdrew his motion after Winston made a counterproposal to “recommend that the SAR be reposted for industry comments.” After Chair Amy Casuscelli, of Xcel Energy, noted that NERC’s Standards Process Manual allows the committee only to accept a SAR, reject it or return it to the drafting team, Winston clarified that he wanted to return it for revisions.

Howard Gugel, NERC’s vice president of engineering and standards, recommended Winston modify his motion further to clarify that the committee was not actually taking any action at this time but wished the drafting team “to repost, with all the other caveats” raised at the meeting. Winston agreed, and the modified motion passed unanimously.