Members of NERC’s Standards Committee agreed to post two closely related standard authorization requests for stakeholder comment in their first gathering of 2026, along with several other standards items.
Meeting via teleconference Jan. 21, the SC also approved the members of its Executive Committee, which includes the SC’s chair and vice chair by default — Todd Bennett of Associated Electric Cooperative Inc. and Troy Brumfield of American Transmission Co., respectively — and three other SC members, each representing a different industry segment from each other or the officers. Its role is to help set the agenda for the monthly meetings and to conduct urgent committee business as needed.
To fill out the EC for 2026, members elected Patti Metro of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, Terri Pyle of Oklahoma Gas & Electric and Venona Greaff of OxyChem Power.
Following the EC election, members discussed the two SARs under consideration for posting. Both propose to revise reliability standard PRC-006-5 (Automatic underfrequency load shedding) to account for the effect of distributed energy resources on UFLS programs.
One SAR, developed by NERC’s System Planning Impacts from DERs Working Group and endorsed by the Reliability and Security Technical Committee, aims to “mitigate the risk posed by various interpretations of the imbalance equation in PRC-005-6 [and] by DER tripping as a cause of adjacent UFLS relay action on armed feeders.” (See NERC RSTC Tackles Priority Projects in Quarterly Meeting.) The other is intended to “improve visibility of current [UFLS] effectiveness” and was reviewed but not endorsed by the RSTC.
After NERC Manager of Standards Development Sandhya Madan presented both SARs, Steve Rueckert, director of standards at WECC, asked whether the ERO was proposing for them to be handled by the same standard drafting team or separate teams. Madan explained that NERC would wait to see “what kind of comments we get from the industry” before deciding that; in response to a question from Exelon’s Claudine Fritz, Madan confirmed that the SC would have the final decision on whether to assign the SARs to the same team.
Following the discussion, members voted to approve both SARs for posting. Madan confirmed they will be posted for a simultaneous 30-day informal comment period; the start date has not been determined. Both SARs will also be considered low-priority projects.
Members next took up two proposals to appoint a chair, vice chair and team members to separate drafting teams. The first item concerned Project 2025-05 (Ride-through revisions), meant to modify PRC-029-1 (Frequency and voltage ride-through requirements for inverter-based resources) to account for IBRs equipped with choppers — equipment that protects offshore wind projects during grid faults.
NERC Manager of Standards Development Alison Oswald reminded attendees that the project is the subject of a FERC deadline mandating that the ERO file a new standard by Aug. 28. (See FERC Approves IBR Ride-through Standards.) The SC voted unanimously to approve the slate of candidates as proposed by the ERO.
However, committee members hit a snag on the next item, a proposal to appoint five supplemental candidates to the drafting team for Project 2022-05 (Modifications to CIP-008 reporting threshold). This item was held over from the committee’s previous meeting in December after members expressed confusion that the background material they were given about multiple candidates did not match their oral descriptions given in the meeting. Rather than try to sort the confusion out during the meeting, members had agreed to bring the item back in January.
This time, Fritz and Brandon Weese of American Electric Power observed that two separate candidates had mismatched information in the background material provided by NERC — specifically, the regions given for both varied in different sections of their biographies. To ensure “a well-balanced drafting team that’s transparent,” Bennett suggested postponing action for another month, observing that this project is also low priority. NERC Manager of Standards Development Jordan Mallory, who was presenting the proposal, agreed.
The final standards action, also presented by Mallory, involved updating BAL-007-1 to capitalize the first letters of the term “Near-Term Energy Reliability Assessments.” Because this change “would have no material impact on the end users of the” standard, it does not require the full standards drafting process. Members voted unanimously to approve the update.
