NERC Cold Weather Standard Development Coming to Close

AUSTIN, Texas — A member of the NERC team drafting the industry’s new cold weather standard told the Texas Reliability Entity Board of Directors last week that the standard is on track to be approved in October.

Occidental Power Services’ Venona Greaff, also a member of Texas RE’s Member Representatives Committee, told Texas RE staff and its directors Wednesday that the standard has been posted for a second round of industry comments. The posting expires Sept. 1.

“There was a lot of effort put in by members of the drafting team, but also by industry,” Greaff told ERO Insider, speaking for the team. Stakeholders “took their first pass at it and felt like they at least had a good starting point. Industry provided a lot of valuable feedback, and the drafting team did everything they could to incorporate that feedback … to get to where we’re at now.”

The new standard for extreme cold-weather preparedness and operations (EOP-012-1) is part of Project 2021-07 (Extreme Cold Weather Grid Operations, Preparedness, and Coordination), which NERC started last year in response to the mass outages caused by the February 2021 winter storm. The standard includes four new requirements and strengthens several existing requirements that address reliability-related findings by NERC, FERC and regional entity staff.

The standard will require generator owners to implement freeze-protection measures so the units can operate for at least 12 continuous hours in extreme cold weather, defined as the temperature equal to the lowest 0.2 percentile of the hourly temperatures measured in December, January and February from January 2000 to present day.

Generator owners will also be responsible for ensuring their units add new or modify existing freeze-protection measures as needed to be able to operate for at least an hour during extreme cold-weather temperatures. Those units not able to meet the one-hour standard will be required to develop a corrective action plan (CAP) for modifications to a cold-weather preparedness plan.

“We’re hopeful that it is something that industry is satisfied with and can get on board with and improve,” Greaff said.

The cold-weather standard will be effective with the 2023 winter season.

NERC’s Board of Trustees will hold a special meeting in October to vote on the standard. It will then go to FERC for final approval.

New Braunfels Chief Discusses Challenges

In a keynote presentation, New Braunfels Utilities (NPU) CEO Ian Taylor said that while the ongoing transformation of the electric grid is “absolutely exciting,” it has also created challenges for utilities across Texas.

“Even [with] foundational activities like procurement and budgeting, what we’ve done in the past is just not adequate anymore for what we’re being called to do,” Taylor said. “We’re adding tools [and] expertise; we’re redefining and creating processes to be able to handle the type of work that we’re [doing]; and then we’re also having to recreate our workforce. …

“You’ve got to recalibrate folks to think critically and analytically in ways they’ve never done before. That takes some work; it doesn’t just come naturally.”

One of the topics that Taylor touched on was the effect of last February’s winter storm, which resulted in more than 23 GW of manual firm load shed, mostly in Texas. NBU itself experienced a number of equipment failures during the crisis, including 21 transformer failures and three downed wires, but it reported no transmission issues.

While the storm was “a significant emotional event” for NBU — a publicly owned provider of water, sewer and electric services in Texas’ Hill Country — Taylor was proud that the utility had no outages on its system after the end of rotating outages and only one tree-related outage during the event. In addition, the crisis was a chance to test NBU’s procedures and see where they came up short when confronted with a real disaster.

“We’ve always had an emergency management plan, but this gave us an opportunity to really go in” and revise the work the utility had done before, Taylor said.

“We got some minimum inventory levels that we didn’t really have formalized before, and lots and lots of lessons learned and coordination with local government entities that came out of that,” he continued.

Fall Workshops Scheduled

The Texas RE has scheduled a pair of workshops this fall focused on grid resilience, security and reliability.

A two-day Extreme Events Resiliency Workshop will be held Sept. 20-21 at a yet-to-be-determined location. Staff will moderate a series of panel discussions with industry experts on planning for and maintaining resilience during both natural and manmade extreme events.

ERCOT staff and state regulators overseeing the electric and gas industries will also be on hand to update attendees on their winterization activities.

Texas RE will host a Standards, Security and Reliability Workshop on Oct. 27 in its Conference Center. Virtual attendance will also be offered.

In other actions, the board’s Nominating Committee put up incumbent independent Directors Crystal Ashby and Jeff Corbett for additional three-year terms, effective January 2023.

Texas RE’s First In-person Meetings

The board and MRC meetings marked the Texas RE’s first in-person meetings since February 2020, just before the COVID pandemic began, and the first in its new office space located conveniently in the same complex as ERCOT’s new headquarters building.

“Every time I think about the date, I [say], ‘It can’t be over two years.’ But it has been,” board Chair Milton Lee said. “This meeting in person has been fantastic. I’m grateful the building was completed. Let’s hope we can continue to meet person-to-person without going back to virtual.”

“We’re still working on the technology in this room,” Texas RE CEO Jim Albright said, referencing several audio problems. “By 2023, we hope we’ll be full bore in how we’re going to have this meeting. You’re kind of the guinea pigs today.”

The board last year approved the entity’s request for a 20% budget increase to $17.2 million to help cover additional staff and relocation costs for the new space. Staff said it will save about $1.3 million over a 10-year period with the move. (See Texas RE Asks for 20% Budget Increase.)