Planning has begun for GridEx VI, which will test response to a coordinated attack from a nation-state adversary, Program Manager Katherine Ledesma told the newly renamed Real Time Operating Subcommittee on Wednesday.

NERC’s design group, which began work on GridEx VI in July, shared its draft scenario narrative during the initial planning meeting last week, Ledesma said. It will be held on Nov. 16-17, 2021.

“The goal for GridEx VI is exercising the response and overall resilience to a coordinated attack from a nation-state adversary,” said Ledesma, who is manager of resilience and policy coordination for NERC’s Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center. “We developed this GridEx goal based on past exercises, feedback from those exercises and current events impacting the grid.”

After beginning with a focus on responding to physical or cybersecurity incidents, the biennial exercise has increasingly sought to address grid operational reliability since GridEx IV in 2015, Ledesma said. It has also increasingly involved law enforcement and other government agencies and critical infrastructure sectors such as telecommunications and natural gas.

“While physical and cybersecurity are hugely important, it all comes down to keeping the lights on — coordinating reliable operation involving generation, transmission and distribution,” she said.

GridEx VI will include more comprehensive training opportunities for players and an opportunity to exercise responses involving supply chain or service providers for critical functions, Ledesma said.

“We are planning GridEx VI to be the most comprehensive, realistic and relevant exercise so far, and we are encouraged by the fact that the number of participating organizations has steadily grown through the years.”

The exercise will include activating incident operating and crisis management response plans; coordination with government to facilitate restoration; identifying interdependence concerns; exercising response to a supply-chain-based compromise; and identifying common mode and cyber operational concerns across interconnections.

As in past years, NERC will tap the GridEx working group — industry and government subject matter experts — to help plan the exercise.

“For GridEx VI we decided to break up this group and instead form smaller, targeted groups to focus on specific aspects of this exercise,” Ledesma said.

Having shared the draft scenario narrative during the initial planning meeting last week, NERC will “continue bringing in smaller SME teams as needed that will be scenario-specific,” she said.

One of those teams will involve reliability coordinators, who will be asked to provide input to the planning and design teams, customize scenarios for each RC area and develop control area-specific injects.

Ledesma asked RCs to provide feedback on what scenarios the exercise should include or exclude and whether it should provide an opportunity to explore regulatory issues.

The overall scenario scope is expected by Feb. 1, with a midterm planning meeting Feb. 24 and a final planning meeting May 26.

2021 Work Plan, GMD Role Reviewed

The subcommittee, which changed its name from the Operating Reliability Subcommittee on Sept. 15, also reviewed its 2021 work plan. The plan includes monitoring development of common tools; acting as the point of contact for the Eastern Interconnect Data Sharing Network; frequency monitoring reporting; and development of a cyber intrusion guide for system operators and a reliability guideline or reference document to improve short-term and mid-term load forecasting.

Mark Olson, manager of reliability assessments, briefed the committee on a task it will be assigned with the pending dissolution of the Geomagnetic Disturbance Task Force, as directed by the Reliability and Security Technical Committee.

Olson said the task force will soon complete all work in its current scope but that there will be an ongoing need to investigate and evaluate geomagnetic disturbance (GMD) events. The committee will collect information from transmission owners and generator owners with geomagnetically induced currents (GIC) or magnetometer data on the estimated 200 strong GMD events in an 11-year solar cycle. The collection portal went into operation last month.

The task force’s two-year research effort with the Electric Power Research Institute, which ended in the first quarter of 2020, produced almost 20 publications, he noted.

“Where a severe GMD event occurs … this [subcommittee] is the group that can kind of talk about what the experience was and what kind of impact you faced and maybe how we can tie into these data streams like the GIC data. Maybe the ERO needs to [obtain] some other expertise to help analyze it, but … you kind of have a recipe in what you do in sharing your RC experience with events currently and now applying that to GMD,” Olson said.

“The reality is we’ve had such quiet solar cycles over the last several decades that there’s not a lot of shared experience,” he added. “But the risk is out there.”

The task force is expected to retire after completing its work plan, which is expected late this year or the first quarter of 2021.