Consolidated Edison subsidiary Orange and Rockland Utilities (ORU) will pay $102,000 to the Northeast Power Coordinating Council for violations of NERC reliability standards as the result of a settlement approved by FERC. 

NERC submitted the settlement to FERC on June 30 in its monthly spreadsheet Notice of Penalty; it was the only settlement for the month. The commission said in a July 30 filing that it would not further review the settlement, leaving the penalty intact (NP25-12).  

ORU, with its subsidiary Rockland Electric, serves about 300,000 electric customers in New York and New Jersey. Two of the three violations in the settlement involved both companies and covered a period of almost 17 years, from 2007 to 2024. They all stemmed from NERC’s FAC family of facility ratings standards. 

The utility reported to NPCC on Oct. 9, 2020, that it had discovered potential violations of FAC-008-1 (Facility ratings methodology) and FAC-008-3 (Facility ratings), along with FAC-014-2 (Establish and communicate system operating limits). Because ORU and Rockland are in coordinated oversight with each other, the first two issues applied to both companies. 

For the FAC-008-1 violation, ORU said that its facility ratings methodology (FRM) “failed to include consideration for operating limitations, such as a topology change.” ORU conducted an extent-of-condition assessment and found no additional issues; however, when NPCC and ReliabilityFirst later completed a joint self-certification review in March 2023, they found that ORU and Rockland had failed to include several topics in the FRM, including: 

• • using a wind speed assumption that does not match ORU’s existing FRM; 
  • a mismatch of ambient temperatures used to establish normal, long-term emergency and short-term emergency ratings of copper tubular bus sections; 
  • insufficient summer and winter ambient temperature information; and 
  • a mismatch of substation configuration data. 

Regarding the infringement of FAC-008-3, ORU and Rockland determined from an internal compliance review that 17 facilities had ratings that were inconsistent with the FRM: four 345/138-kV transformers and 13 138-kV transmission lines. The changes resulted in derates of up to 40%, though 75% of the derates were less than 13%, and increased ratings of up to 17%. As for the FAC-014-2 violation, ORU reported that the system operating limits of 14 facilities had been incorrectly calculated during 64 breaker outages. 

All of the violations posed a moderate risk, according to NPCC, and no harm is known to have occurred. To mitigate the infringements, ORU and Rockland have updated their main FRM document with language addressing the use of operating limits when calculating facility ratings, provided training to responsible staff on FAC-008 compliance and created a new spreadsheet to organize ratings data.  

The utilities also revised all applicable facility ratings, implemented a new process checklist to be completed prior to energizing grid additions and modifications, and created a requirement for annual validation of all changes to or affecting facilities within the previous 12 months. 

Because ORU and Rockland are in RF’s footprint as well as NPCC’s, the REs will split the penalty payment based on relative net energy for load, with RF receiving $59,177.