Utilities have only a few days left to submit a required report on the winterization of their generating units, NERC said in its Standards, Compliance and Enforcement Bulletin issued May 12. 

May 15 is the deadline for the first annual submission of information ordered under Section 1600 of the ERO’s Rules of Procedure, which allows NERC and the regional entities to request information from registered entities “necessary to meet their obligations under … the Federal Power Act,” as authorized by the Board of Trustees. 

NERC developed the data request after filing a work plan with FERC in February 2024 detailing its intent to collect and analyze cold weather data, as ordered by the commission a year earlier (RD23-1). (See FERC Orders New Reliability Standards in Response to Uri.) The board approved the data request at its quarterly meeting Dec. 10, 2024. (See “Organizational Items Endorsed,” NERC Board of Trustees Briefs: Dec. 10, 2024.) 

According to the data request page, generator owners must provide minimum and maximum ambient operating temperatures, extreme cold weather temperatures (ECWTs) and constraints for each generating unit, along with corrective action plans for generator cold weather reliability events. Canadian entities are not required to comply with the request, but NERC said registered GOs based in Canada “are welcome to” respond. Information from Canadian entities will not be submitted to FERC. 

ECWT refers to “the temperature equal to the lowest 0.2 percentile of the hourly temperatures measured in December, January and February from [Jan. 1, 2000,] through the date the temperature is calculated.” A cold weather constraint is defined as any condition that prevents a GO from implementing freeze protection measures on at least one cold-weather critical component, according to criteria from NERC’s Frequently Asked Questions document. 

Generator cold weather reliability events are one or more of the following events when apparently caused by the freezing of equipment or freezing precipitation on equipment within the GO’s control, when the air temperature was at or above the ECWT: 

• • a forced derate of more than 10% of the unit’s total capacity, not less than 20 MW for longer than four hours; 
  • a startup failure and failure to synchronize within a specified time; or 
  • a forced outage. 

• Entities will be able to amend submitted information until June 15, a provision NERC said is intended for utilities that are still determining whether corrective action plans are needed for cold weather events in the most recent winter. If entities still have not determined this information by June 15, they can include it in the following year’s filing. 

For this first informational filing, entities must submit the required information by uploading a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet through the ERO Portal, which opened April 1. NERC said GOs should include all generating facilities that they own in their spreadsheets. Access will be limited to primary compliance contacts and entity administrators of registered GOs for the initial reports. An automated submission process will be implemented in time for the 2026 data request.