At an abbreviated meeting on Wednesday, members of NERC’s Standards Committee approved four standard authorization requests (SARs) and the teams to work on them.

Two of the SARs that came before the committee at Wednesday’s meeting were coming off of industry comment periods after having been accepted at prior meetings. First up was Project 2022-01 (Reporting area control error (ACE) definition and associated terms), which first came before the committee at its January meeting; the committee approved the SAR drafting team in April. (See NERC Standards Committee Moves Projects Forward.)

Amy Casuscelli, Xcel Energy | NERC

The goal of the project is to revise the definition of reporting ACE, which in its current form conflicts with the Western Interconnection’s automatic time error correction (ATEC) process and does not allow other interconnections to develop ATEC at all, according to the Reliability and Security Technical Committee’s (RSTC) Resources Subcommittee. By redefining the term, NERC hopes to “improve long-term average frequency performance” and to help other interconnections “pursue automatic correction approaches.” The committee approved the SAR and agreed to appoint the SAR drafting team as the standard drafting team (SDT).

Also before the committee was Project 2021-02 (Modifications to VAR-002), which was proposed by NERC’s Inverter-based Resource Performance Task Force in 2020 and endorsed by the RSTC the same year. The Standards Committee accepted it in January 2021 and appointed the SAR drafting team that July. (See Standards Committee Approves Drafting Team Additions.) The Project 2021-02 SAR has gone through two industry comment periods since then; the most recent ended in April.

In addition to approving the SAR, members also agreed to a 30-day solicitation period for additional members of the SDT. Latrice Harkness, NERC’s manager of standards development, said the organization is seeking transmission operators with expertise in “receiving and applying information to [their] real-time assessment and real-time monitoring activities” because the project proposes to add a requirement to VAR-002-4.1 for generator operators to notify their TOPs of status changes in voltage-controlling devices.

ERATF SARs Approved After RSTC Endorsement

The committee also approved two SARs submitted by the Energy Reliability Assessment Task Force (ERATF) and endorsed by the RSTC at its meeting last week. (See “SARs Move to Standards Committee,” NERC RSTC Briefs: June 8-9, 2022.) The SARs are grouped under a single project, intended to update NERC’s reliability standards to require utilities to perform energy reliability assessments in order to evaluate energy assurance.

The item did not face any serious opposition, though Linn Oelker of LG&E and KU asked to clarify why two SARs were needed, pointing out that their scope seemed to be identical. Harkness acknowledged the similarity between the two proposals and explained the ERATF thought they ought to be separate because one applies to the operations time horizon and the other applies to the planning horizon. She added that this assessment is subject to change as the drafting team’s work continues.

“Moving forward, if the SAR drafting team did decide that they wanted to combine these [or] to reword them, that’s an option that the … team will have,” Harkness said.

July Meeting to be Held in Person

Chair Amy Casuscelli, of Xcel Energy, reminded committee members that their next meeting July 20 will be held in person, for the first time since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, at Xcel’s offices in Denver from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. MT. The gathering will be followed by a joint meeting with NERC’s Compliance and Certification Committee, from 1 to 4 p.m.

Howard Gugel, NERC’s vice president of engineering and standards, noted that the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Power and Energy Society is also holding its 2022 general meeting in Denver, July 17-21, and encouraged attendees to line up their hotel reservations early “because there’ll be a lot of folks in town that week.”