Members of NERC’s Standards Committee voted in favor of expanding the teams behind several existing standards projects at their monthly meeting March 19.
The first standards action to come before the committee concerned Project 2021-01 (system model validation with inverter-based resources), a project intended to satisfy FERC Order 901. Specifically, the project addresses Milestone 3 of the order, which covers data sharing and model validation for all IBRs; standards under this milestone are due by November 2025.
Currently the standard drafting team for Project 2021-01 consists of six members; the proposal before the SC was to add five more members for a total of 11. NERC solicited nominations for SDT members from Nov. 21 to Dec. 20, 2024, receiving 13 nominations that the ERO then narrowed down to five based on “background, experience and skills,” including “expertise in system model validation, system model practices and disturbance-based playback.”
Candidates were not identified by name or corporate affiliation during the meeting, in keeping with NERC’s confidentiality policy.
Sean Bodkin, senior counsel at Dominion Energy, said he supported adding more team members but felt uneasy about the fact that half of the candidates were from WECC’s footprint. He proposed evening out this perceived regional imbalance by replacing one of NERC’s candidates with another industry nominee from SERC Reliability’s territory.
“There’s definitely IBRs throughout the whole country, especially in the Southeast,” Bodkin said. “I don’t think I can support the slate as is. I think we need to balance it out and get some other regions of the country and … people with as good, if not better, expertise as some of the [candidates] put forward by NERC on the team.”
NERC Manager of Standards Development Sandhya Madan explained that NERC chose not to include Bodkin’s preferred candidate because they “didn’t have sufficient IBR experience” compared to the one Bodkin suggested dropping. She suggested increasing the number of candidates to six, but Bodkin stuck with his proposal, saying he wanted to keep the SDT membership “manageable.” Ultimately, however, Bodkin’s motion did not receive a second and SC members voted to approve NERC’s candidate slate without changes.
Members next turned to Project 2020-06 (verifications of models and data for generators), which applies to the same milestone of Order 901.
NERC staff and leadership of the project’s SDT asked for the SC to approve soliciting more team members, both to address recent issues meeting quorum at team meetings due to departing members and to add needed expertise. Madan explained the team recently was assigned a new standard, MOD-034, and leadership wanted to make sure members had the requisite experience. The motion was approved unanimously.
A proposal to reassign the task of revising FAC-001-4 (facility interconnection requirements) and FAC-002-4 (facility interconnection studies) from Project 2022-04 (EMT modeling) to Project 2023-05 (modifications to FAC-001 and FAC-002) met with another suggested change from Bodkin. He said that, rather than move the standard authorization request (SAR) from one team to another, it would be better to create a completely new team for this purpose.
NERC Director of Standards Development Jamie Calderon replied that the team for Project 2023-05 “has not been seated” or started work on their project yet, so it is not the same as adding a SAR to an already active project. She acknowledged the team might feel they need more members but suggested they could come back to the committee to ask for more nominees.
Bodkin still moved to form a separate team for the new SAR, but the motion was defeated with nine votes against, six in favor and two abstentions. The original proposal then passed, with no abstentions and Bodkin, Vicki O’Leary of Eversource and Maggy Powell of Amazon Web Services voting against it.
