WECC continued its focus on reliability threats to the Western grid last week with a workshop on risk priorities and the first meeting of its new Reliability Risk Committee (RRC).

In the online Risk Priorities Workshop, stakeholders were split into a dozen small groups that each discussed four broad categories of reliability and security dangers for the bulk power system in the Western Interconnection. Two categories focused on the grid’s transition to renewable resources and its potential to undermine resource adequacy and transmission. Another dealt with security threats, and the fourth addressed extreme weather events.

“Our goal today is to narrow this universe of risks down to a preliminary list of, let’s say, around a dozen,” Victoria Ravenscroft, WECC’s senior policy and external affairs manager, told attendees Feb. 15. “To do this, we put the risks down into four categories to allow for manageable conversations. Each breakout group will discuss one of these risks, and everyone in this webinar today will discuss all four of these risks.”

Participants later prioritized what they believed to be the major threats in each category by voting on a mobile app. WECC compiled the top five results from all categories, generating a ranking with three top contenders: cyberattacks; human performance and skilled workforce; and extreme heat and drought.

Conversations in the breakout groups included talk of cyberattacks, including May’s Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, and the perils of inexpensive drones to grid infrastructure.

The hazards of heat waves, like the one that caused rolling blackouts in California in August 2020, and deep freezes, like the one that nearly collapsed ERCOT’s grid last winter, featured prominently.

Workforce shortages caused by the retirement of skilled employees was another top conversation topic.

The workforce concerns were a new addition to the top-risks list, surprising some participants.

“I really appreciate the ‘crowdsource/wisdom of the crowds’ approach to collecting input, because I’ve been doing kind of remote regulatory support for long enough that human performance wouldn’t have been on my radar screen,” Brian Theaker, vice president of Western regulatory and market affairs at Middle River Power, said during a meeting of the Member Advisory Committee (MAC) held the next day. “But clearly, it’s an issue for a lot of … utility folks.”

Another MAC member, Grace Anderson, an adviser with the California Energy Commission, said, “I was surprised it rated that high on this list, but it did come up repeatedly in the sessions for my group.”

Anderson said her group lamented the loss of system knowledge that comes with retirements but also voiced concerns about the practice of younger employees departing utilities for more lucrative jobs in consulting.

“The attitudes and experience of the younger workers they do bring on are just from a different generation and a different set of experiences so that the twain doesn’t necessarily meet the way it has in the past,” she said.

WECC will use the rankings in the development of its biennial Reliability Risk Priorities report that identifies the Western Interconnection’s top hazards and guides WECC workplans.

The ERO’s first report in 2020 focused on resource adequacy, a changing resource mix, “extreme natural events” and the impacts to the grid of distributed energy resources and behind-the-meter storage. (See WECC Board Adopts Reliability Risk List.)

As for that report, this year’s workshop list will go to a WECC Board of Directors workshop in April and be subject to a board vote in June. WECC technical committees will then develop three-year workplans around the risk priorities, to be shared with stakeholders at the regional entity’s annual meeting in September.

Workshop participants praised WECC’s online orchestration of the workshop and expressed optimism about how its findings will contribute to future industry discussions on reliability in the Western Interconnection.

Speaking at the inaugural meeting of the RRC just after the workshop, Anderson offered a “shout out” to WECC staff for hitting a “grand slam” with the event.

“It was implemented, I think, flawlessly, because there was an enormous amount of work done behind the scenes in advance — a very difficult, complex set of arrangements,” Anderson said. She said the success was an “auspicious sign” for the launch of the newly formed RRC, which will take up many of the subjects unearthed at the event.

“You could clearly see how much effort went into it because it was seamless; so, yeah, major kudos to WECC and their staff,” MAC Chair Brenda Ambrosi, market policy and operations manager at BC Hydro, said at Wednesday’s MAC meeting.

Question of ‘Engagement’ on the RRC

It’s not often that a power industry meeting invokes the thinking of a storied president or a member of the Supreme Court in one sitting, but the launch of the RRC was just such an occasion.

The product of a yearlong — and at times contentious — effort to recast WECC’s stakeholder committee structure to closely align with its risk-oriented mission, the RRC is not so much a new body as it is a melding of the longstanding Operating (OC) and Market Implementation (MIC) committees. (See WECC Board Approves Stakeholder Committee Shakeup.)

And with that blending comes redefined roles. According to its charter, the RRC is tasked with identifying and addressing “known and emerging risks to the reliability and security of the Western Interconnection.” Its responsibilities will include:

• evaluating “the reliability and security risks associated with relevant commercial, operational and other industry practices”;
• working with WECC staff and the Reliability Assessment Committee “to develop and maintain an ongoing, prioritized list of known and emerging reliability and security risks facing the Western Interconnection; and
• initiating actions “to address priority risks through the appropriate expertise and mechanism.”

RRC Chair Jon Aust, vice president of operations at the Western Area Power Administration, said the Stakeholder Engagement Task Force (SETF) that birthed the committee identified “the merger between commercial and reliability operations, and how those interplay with one another.” The group recognized a need to bring the two disciplines together into a shared forum.

“And that’s really at the core of why the MIC and the OC really have become the RRC,” Aust said.

RRC member Chifong Thomas, a transmission planning engineer with GridBright, said she was happy the RRC would include participants from both planning and operations.

“From participating in [WECC’s] Path Task Force, I understand that we have a different language; we’re separated by different language,” Thomas said. “So, the more we interact with each other, the better off we will be for the reliability of the system.”

Aust said he envisions a “dynamic” membership for the RRC, which should include real subject matter experts and people with the authority to make decisions on behalf of their organizations. He then posed the question of what other RRC members think should constitute true “stakeholder engagement” on the committee.

“It’s important that the organization send the right member, and it needs to be somebody who’s interested in what WECC’s doing and somebody that’s knowledgeable about WECC and NERC missions, goals and responsibilities,” said Ken Silver, vice president of storage operations and reliability at 8minutenergy Renewables.

Silver advised companies against sending staff to just “fill a chair” on the committee and instead select those equipped to share knowledge about relevant reliability matters.

“The sharing of ideas is paramount to engagement, and grid reliability is a concern for all of us, because we sink or swim together when it comes to reliability. And WECC and committees play a key role in our collective wellbeing,” Silver said.

“I always like to paraphrase President [John F.] Kennedy: Ask not what WECC can do for you; ask what you can do for WECC.”

Bryce Freeman, administrator of the Wyoming Office of Consumer Advocate, was demur about his ability to answer such “philosophical questions,” but he channeled the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in his attempt to do so.

“What does stakeholder engagement look like? I don’t know. Kind of like pornography. I recognize it when I see it, right?”

Freeman would instead “turn that question on its head” and ask how the committee could make its work engaging for the people volunteering their time join to it.

“WECC has always been good at not only identifying risks, but being able to see over the horizon to identify risks, and I think that is what is going to be critically important in the next five to 10 years as the resource mix changes, as there becomes multiple voices and multiple purposes about transmission.”

The RRC is expected to meet again in June.