At their final meeting of 2024, members of NERC’s Standards Committee said goodbye to several departing colleagues while arranging the committee’s business for the coming year.

Chair Todd Bennett of Associated Electric Cooperative Inc. thanked all the members whose terms expire at the end of December, with particular praise for his predecessor as chair, Amy Casuscelli of Xcel Energy.

“I’ve been in the room quite a bit with her [over] the past eight years with the Standards Committee,” Bennett said, listing Casuscelli’s “two terms as chair, one term as vice chair and a couple years as a general committee member.”

“Thank you, Amy, for your service, and thank you to all the members who are exiting,” he continued.

Along with Casuscelli, the following members’ terms expire at the end of 2024:

• • Charles Yeung — Southwest Power Pool
  • Vicki O’Leary — Eversource Energy
  • Patti Metro — National Rural Electric Cooperative Association
  • Jim Howell — Treaty Oak Clean Energy
  • Justin Welty — NextEra Energy
  • Venona Greaff — Occidental Chemical
  • Philip Winston — Retired
  • William Chambliss — Virginia State Corporation Commission
  • Steven Rueckert — WECC

To fill their seats the committee is holding an election, which ends Dec. 13. Yeung, O’Leary, Metro and Greaff were nominated for reelection in the nomination period that ran from Oct. 21 to Nov. 12 and are unopposed in their segments, as were John Martinez of FirstEnergy, who was named to succeed Casuscelli; Josh Hale of Southern Power, who will replace Howell; and Daniela Cismaru of Alberta’s Market Surveillance Administrator, nominated in Chambliss’ segment.

Segment 6, representing electricity brokers, aggregators and marketers, has three nominees to succeed Welty: Sean Bodkin of Dominion Energy; Richard Vendetti of NextEra; and Jennie Wike of Tacoma Power. For this segment, the recipient of the most votes will serve a full two-year term replacing Welty, while the runner-up will serve out the remaining term of Con Edison’s Peter Yost, who was to have served until the end of 2025 but stepped down from the SC earlier this year due to retirement.

Segments 8 (small electricity users) and 10 (regional entities), which received no nominations, will remain vacant until special elections are held in 2025, according to Dominique Love, standards developer and project manager at NERC.

The SC also seeks nominees for its Executive Committee, which, under the SC’s charter, consists of the chair and vice chair (respectively, Bennett and Troy Brumfield of American Transmission Co.) with three to five segment members elected by the full SC. SCEC members meet between regularly scheduled SC meetings to conduct SC business.

EC members cannot represent the same industry segments as the chair and vice chair; Bennett previously represented Segment 3, while Brumfield was from Segment 1. Nominations will be accepted through Jan. 6. The SC will elect EC members at next month’s meeting, currently scheduled for Jan. 22.

Only one standards action came before the committee at the meeting: a standard authorization request (SAR) from the drafting team for Project 2023-09 (Risk management for third-party cloud services).

The SC authorized the first SAR for the project a year ago and appointed the drafting team in July. The project’s remit is to “establish risk-based, outcome driven requirements that align cloud services with other third-party resources already used for CIP [critical infrastructure protection]-regulated systems” so that utilities can take advantage of the efficiency and resiliency potential of cloud services while reducing risk as much as possible.

Since their first meeting in August, team members have reviewed industry comments on the initial SAR and revised it to address stakeholder concerns. The changes to the SAR they submitted at the meeting include “allowing flexibility” as to whether to draft a new standard or revise existing standards, allowing the team to use additional reference documents and “defining a scope while allowing room for the team to address the language in the way they see fit.” The SAR passed unanimously.