NERC’s proposed reliability standard addressing ride-through protection for inverter-based resources (IBR) has finally received the required industry votes to move forward to FERC approval, and the ERO’s Board of Trustees is scheduled to meet next week to formally adopt it, along with NERC’s other proposed IBR standards. 

In a formal ballot round that ended Sept. 30, industry stakeholders, voting by segment, cast 184 votes in favor of PRC-029-1 (Frequency and voltage ride-through requirements for IBRs), compared with 34 negative votes with comments, while 53 members of the ballot body either abstained or didn’t cast a vote.  

NERC weights its standards voting by segment participation so that industry segments with fewer voters will count less in the final tally. Therefore, the final segment-weighted value is 86.41 in favor, well over both the two-thirds majority needed for approval in normal cases and the 60% majority needed under the special circumstances approved by the board at its August meeting. 

That meeting saw NERC’s board exercise for the first time its authority to streamline the ERO’s regular stakeholder approval process, after PRC-029-1 did not receive industry approval after multiple ballot rounds. Board Chair Kenneth DeFontes warned this put the ERO in danger of failing to meet FERC’s deadline, imposed last year, to submit reliability standards addressing IBR performance requirements, disturbance monitoring data sharing and post-event performance validation by Nov. 4, 2024. (See NERC Board of Trustees/MRC Briefs: Aug. 15, 2024.) 

The board ordered NERC’s Standards Committee to convene a technical conference to receive input from industry and other ERO stakeholders on the ride-through standard in order to shape a version palatable to enough ballot body members to get across the finish line. At the conference, which was held Sept. 4-5 in Washington, D.C., representatives from a range of industry segments — including NERC, original equipment manufacturers and utilities — discussed their issues with the proposed standard. (See NERC, Industry Discuss IBR Issues in Technical Conference.) 

After the conference, NERC revised the standard to address attendees’ concerns, including the clarity of the definition of “ride-through,” criteria for frequency ride-through performance and exemptions to ride-through criteria for equipment with hardware limits. These revisions were summarized in a memo on the project’s page on NERC’s website. 

The standard will not be posted for the customary final ballot, another result of the streamlined process approved at the August board meeting. At their meeting next week, trustees will vote on PRC-029-1, along with the other IBR standards that are subject to FERC’s November deadline and were approved in previous ballot rounds: 

• • PRC-028-1 — Disturbance monitoring and reporting requirements for inverter-based resources. 

• • PRC-002-5 — Disturbance monitoring and reporting requirements. 

• • PRC-024-4 — Frequency and voltage protection settings for synchronous generators, Type 1 and Type 2 wind resources, and synchronous condensers. 

• • PRC-030-1 — Unexpected inverter-based resource event mitigation. 

Also on the board’s agenda are revisions to the charter of NERC’s Reliability and Security Technical Committee (RSTC) that are intended to improve the balance of industry representation at meetings. The new rules will allow a sector to seek a special election to fill an open seat representing it, rather than have that seat convert to an at-large member as the current charter provides.  

In addition, they will remove the numerical cap on the number of representatives from a sector that can serve as at-large members and will direct the RSTC Nominating Subcommittee to prioritize balanced sector representation.