SERC has levied $140,000 in penalties against utilities in Mississippi and Florida for violations of NERC’s reliability standards, in two separate settlements recently approved by FERC. 

The settlements, submitted in April in NERC’s monthly spreadsheet notice of penalty, are with Florida Power and Light (FPL) for $120,000 and Mississippi’s Cooperative Energy for $20,000 (NP25-11). FERC said in a filing May 23 that it would not further review the settlements, leaving the penalties intact. 

Both settlements concern the standard FAC-008-5 (Facility ratings), which requires that transmission owners and generation owners have facility ratings for [their] solely and jointly owned facilities that are consistent with the associated … methodology or documentation for determining [their] facility ratings.” FPL’s noncompliance was discovered through a compliance audit; Cooperative self-reported its infringement. 

SERC conducted its onsite audit of FPL from June 20 to 24, 2022. The regional entity’s audit team walked down four transmission substations and found a 138-kV, 230-kV and 500-kV substation with incorrect facility ratings. 

Following this finding, SERC required FPL to walk down eight transmission facilities and eight generation facilities to look for more misratings. The utility found one incorrect rating among the transmission facilities, a 230-kV line that needed a 25% derate; at the generation facilities, FPL found one station with incorrect facility ratings, two more stations with incorrect or missing equipment ratings, and one where the walkdown could not be completed because the current transformers could not be verified without an outage. 

FPL then did an extent of condition assessment requiring walkdowns of all 1,822 transmission facilities and 180 generation facilities. It found 153 incorrect transmission facility ratings, including one facility that experienced an exceedance of the correct rating. The biggest derate required was 93% on a 115-kV line. For the generation facilities, 12 derates were required and three uprates. 

SERC determined the violation began June 18, 2007, when FAC-009-1 — the predecessor of FAC-008-5 — was in effect. The root cause was ineffective controls, specifically training management controls, validation controls and controls to ensure the utility’s management of change process was carried out successfully. The RE assessed the risk posed by the noncompliance as moderate. 

FPL’s mitigating actions include adding a training course on the FAC-008 worksheet to its learning management system, standardizing the procedure for walking down transmission and substation facilities, and improving the implementation of controls and ensuring they’re working as designed. 

Cooperative Discovered Repeat Issue

Cooperative notified SERC of its noncompliance Jan. 30, 2024. As with FPL, SERC determined the violation spanned both FAC-009-1 and FAC-008-5. 

The utility discovered during a substation facility walkdown that the current transformer (CT) rating factor for a gas circuit breaker was not on the CT’s nameplate. This GCB was older than the others in the same facility, which were installed on the same date.  

Upon reviewing the nameplate and electronic documentation, Cooperative could not find a correct CT rating factor. As a result, the utility had to change to a more conservative rating factor than the one that was in its database, requiring a derate on the affected line. 

Cooperative found no further CT rating factor issues on other substations. It went on to verify elements at five substations that had been walked down but later had field work done requiring another in-person examination. 

In the SNOP, SERC noted the violation began June 18, 2007, and ended Nov. 8, 2023, when Cooperative changed the CT tap setting to account for the CT rerating. The total duration of the infringement was more than 16 years. The RE said the cause of the violation was “an ineffective training program” that did not equip staff to recognize that the breaker was an older model that required a different CT rating factor. 

SERC observed that Cooperative has a history with this specific type of misrating. Cooperative and SERC settled in 2023 for a similar infringement, when the utility failed to consider CTs when determining facility ratings for its solely and jointly owned facilities. (See FERC Approves SERC Settlement with Mississippi Co-op.)  

Although that settlement did not result in a monetary penalty, the RE said it considered the utility’s history as an aggravating factor in determining the penalty for this case because the changes put in place after the earlier infringement should have detected this one.