In response to a request from FERC Chairman Richard Glick and NERC CEO Jim Robb, the North American Energy Standards Board (NAESB) confirmed Thursday it will launch a forum aimed at addressing concerns raised after the winter storm of February 2021.

According to a press release from NAESB, the organization has not yet settled on a time or agenda for the forum, but an organizational meeting has been scheduled for 2-4 p.m. CT on Aug. 30 to “discuss the next steps the organization will take to host the forum.” The meeting will be held on Zoom and open to any interested parties.

Glick and Robb suggested the forum in a joint letter on July 29 addressed to NAESB COO Jonathan Booe and board Chairman Michael Desselle, citing FERC and NERC’s joint report on the storms. (See FERC, NERC Call for NAESB Forum on Gas-electric Issues.) The report called for FERC to establish “a forum in which representatives of state legislatures and/or regulators with jurisdiction over natural gas infrastructure [can] identify concrete actions” to improve reliability of the natural gas system as it relates to the bulk electric system.

The winter storms led to widespread generation outages, derates or failures to start that caused more than 23 GW of manual firm load shed mostly in Texas, the biggest firm load shed in U.S. history. According to the FERC-NERC report, natural gas facilities accounted for more than 50% of generation failures, both in terms of the number of units and their total nameplate capacity. (See FERC, NERC Release Final Texas Storm Report.)

Stakeholders in the ERO Enterprise have increasingly come to see the interdependency of the U.S. gas system and electric grid as a significant vulnerability, because of natural disasters like last year’s storms and cyber incidents like the ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline in May 2021. (See Colonial Hack Sparks Competing Recommendations at FERC.) In their July letter, Glick and Robb said NAESB is “uniquely positioned” to organize the needed dialogue between the gas and electric industries; in their press release, NAESB’s leadership said they appreciated the confidence.

“NAESB has a long history of bringing diverse groups together to find consensus-based solutions to industry problems,” Valerie Crockett, vice chair of NAESB’s Wholesale Gas Quadrant, said in the statement. “While NAESB was not necessarily asked to develop specific standards in response to this request, it can serve an important role by recommending activities that appropriate entities within the energy markets may undertake to support grid stability.”

NAESB did announce a standards project aimed at improving gas and electric coordination in December but has not released any subsequent updates about the initiative. Booe told ERO Insider earlier this month that action had stalled after the organization was unable to “find consensus from our groups” about the appropriate direction of the project, but that Glick and Robb’s call for the forum might help reinvigorate the initiative.