Texas Reliability Entity staff advised Texas entities recently that they won’t see NERC’s recently approved cold weather standards until 2023, but that they will continue to have reliability site inspections.
“You’re not going to see the NERC standards in place this winter,” Mark Henry, Texas RE’s director of reliability services, said during a Talk with Texas RE webinar July 8, noting that it could take 18 months for them to become official.
“We will continue to go out and do these site visits in some form or fashion,” he told his virtual audience of 125 attendees.
NERC’s Board of Trustees in June approved three updated standards requiring generator operators (GOs) to protect their units against freezing and share their cold-weather operating parameters with regulators. Those standards now go before FERC for the commission’s review and approval. (See NERC Board OKs Cold Weather Standards.)
“These standards center around the operating authorities getting information about generator status and issues, and the generators providing that information,” Henry said. “The generation owner and generation operator is the new part … having plans and implementing them. It applies to the owner, as written, but whatever works best for your facility.”
NERC has been working on the updated standards since before the February winter storm that slammed Texas and nearly collapsed the ERCOT grid. Within the last decade, a similar, albeit smaller, winter event in the Southwest and a polar vortex in 2014 took place before a 2018 cold-weather event that affected SPP, MISO, the Tennessee Valley Authority and SERC Reliability.
EOP-011-2 (Emergency preparedness and operations) would require GOs to protect their units from freezing “based on geographical location and plant configuration”; identify operating parameters such as minimum-design temperature and fuel-switching capabilities; and to provide maintenance and operating personnel with unit-specific training on the plan.
IRO-010-4 (Reliability coordinator data specification and collection) would require reliability coordinators, transmission operators and balancing authorities to include information from their cold-weather plans in their data specifications.
TOP-003-5 (Operational reliability data) directs GOs to satisfy the specification using a mutually agreeable process.
