By Christen Smith

ReliabilityFirst said Monday that inaccurate facility ratings continue to undermine the safety and reliability of the bulk electric system.

The regional entity said transmission and generation owners must shore up internal controls during the planning process to ensure that a facility’s rating remains accurate post-construction.

Speaking during an open forum conference call, Jim Uhrin, RF’s director of compliance monitoring, said that gaps in program execution — identified by NERC as an area of focus in the 2019 and 2020 ERO Implementation Plans — leaves owners noncompliant with the FAC-008 standard for facility ratings.

Uhrin said a majority of outages between 2015 and 2018 were caused by failed AC circuit and substation equipment and protection systems, according to information gathered from NERC’s Transmission Availability Data System.

ReliabilityFirst outages by cause, TADS 2015-2018 | ReliabilityFirst

While Uhrin said the exact reason for this is unknown, other issues occur alongside this data point. Often, he said, changes to equipment — from breakers to wave traps to line conductors — during the planning and construction process of a facility may not make it into the database used to calculate system operating limits and create planning models.

“Things are being missed,” Uhrin said. “What we believe is happening … as things change in the field, there is not a … ‘post-as-built’ field verification.”

The impact, he said, is obvious: Inaccurate data will create a host of errors that could jeopardize the safe operation of facilities.

“Each and every one of those things need to be accounted for as far the facility goes when establishing a line rating,” he said. “These are critical to make sure that everybody has it right.”

In April, FERC approved a $40,000 fine against Duquesne Light Co. for inaccurate ratings of some substation conductors and a 138-kV circuit, violations of FAC-008-3 R6. (See FERC OKs NERC Violation Settlements.)

Cycle for facility planning and modeling. | ReliabilityFirst

The substation inaccuracy — caused by entering an incorrect input value into one of the rating equations — resulted in a reduction of the overall facility rating for three transformers.

The violation extended for more than two years because Duquesne “lacked an effective verification control” to quickly detect and correct the error, NERC said. The company alerted RF of the problem in a self-report in August 2017, after completing its mitigation plan.

NERC credited Duquesne for its cooperation in the investigation but said the company’s FAC-008/FAC-009 compliance history was an aggravating factor in determining the penalty.

RF said Monday it will consider making substation visits when necessary if internal controls are not sufficiently tightened.

“We strongly encourage you to do whatever you need to do those post-field verifications,” Uhrin said. “Focus on high-risk assets first that are more impactful for the grid, and work backwards from there.”