NERC’s Standards Committee moved ahead with several standards development projects, while ending another, at a fast-moving meeting on Wednesday.

Members first approved teams to draft standard authorization requests (SAR) for Project 2021-01 (Modifications to MOD-025 and PRC-019) and Project 2021-02 (Modifications to VAR-002). The SAR drafting team for Project 2021-01 includes a chair, vice chair and 10 additional members, while the team for Project 2021-02 has 11 members including the chair and vice chair.

NERC had recommended a slate of 11 members for Project 2021-01, including the leadership, but the committee decided to add more to the team at the suggestion of Robert Blohm from Keen Resources, who noted that NERC’s 11 recommendations came from a slate of 18 industry nominations. Reminding committee members that they had previously discussed encouraging industry participation in standard drafting teams (SDT), Blohm moved to add two of the unrecommended nominees to the team; when this motion failed to receive a second, he revised it to just one additional member, which passed.

Marty Hostler, reliability compliance manager for the Northern California Power Agency, made a similar motion regarding the team for Project 2021-02, calling for one additional member to be added from the pool of nominees not recommended by NERC. However, while Blohm seconded this motion, it failed to carry; other committee members suggested that NERC might wish to save those unrecommended nominees for other SDTs. Consultant Philip Winston moved that NERC’s recommended slate be approved with no changes; this motion passed without objection.

The committee next moved to Project 2020-06 (Verifications of models and data for generators), approving the SARs submitted by the SAR drafting team and naming this team as the project’s SDT. Also accepted was a SAR submitted by ISO-NE proposing modifications to CIP-002-5.1a (BES cyber system categorization) and CIP-014-2 (Physical security); the committee agreed to authorize posting of the SAR for a 30-day formal comment period and assign the SAR to the SDT for Project 2021-03 (CIP-002 Transmission owner control centers).

Finally, committee members voted to reject the SAR for Project 2019-05 (Modifications to PER-003-2) and disband the project’s SDT. Unlike previous occasions on which the committee rejected a SAR — for example, the case of Project 2020-01 in December — this was not caused by any issues with the SAR itself or the drafting team. (See SAR Rejected over Industry Concerns, NERC Standards Committee Briefs: Dec. 9, 2020.)

Instead, the project was ended at the request of NERC’s Personnel Certification Governance Committee, which recently formed a joint task force with the Credential Maintenance Working Group to investigate the potential impact of the proposed changes. The SAR is to be withdrawn until the investigation has been completed and “the joint task force has obtained the necessary technical justification to support NERC’s effort to again move forward.”