The NERC Standards Committee on Wednesday appointed additional or supplemental members to three of the ERO’s 19 ongoing standards development projects’ drafting teams, as the organization works to catch up on some behind-schedule work.

The appointments were only a small part of a packed agenda for the committee, which met at the Texas Reliability Entity headquarters in Austin. It also authorized the initial postings of three draft standards; appointed two standard authorization request (SAR) drafting teams as the standard drafting teams for those projects; approved another SAR; and appointed the roster for another SAR drafting team.

In opening the meeting, Chair Amy Casuscelli, of Xcel Energy, noted that she had the day before attended a meeting of the Project Management and Oversight Subcommittee, which monitors the projects.

“I was just struck by the number of the projects that are open. There are more on the horizon that were discussed at the RSTC [Reliability and Security Technical Committee] meeting last week. There’s just a lot of work that’s coming up,” Casuscelli said. “All of those projects touch a really large number of our subject-matter experts … not to mention NERC staff, and there’s a really tremendous resource obligation that is wrapped up into all of those projects. … We are all definitely feeling the resource constraints that we have. … That means we all need to challenge ourselves to work smarter and work as efficiently as possible.”

Latrice Harkness, NERC manager of standards development, previewed the committee’s next three months, including the schedule for when draft standards would be voted on and posted for comment. The posting schedule listed projects for nearly every week through the end of October.

“That’s a lot of work coming down very quickly,” Kent Feliks, manager of NERC reliability assurance at American Electric Power, commented in response. “My people are already screaming that we already have a lot on our plate.”

“Our standards staff is meeting weekly … to look at this posting schedule a little more closely to make sure we’re not overwhelming industry with those project postings,” Harkness said.

“I know internally we’ve got some protests at the sheer number of things that we’re looking at too,” Casuscelli said with a chuckle. “So I think we’re all feeling it.”

8th Nominee Added over NERC Protest

The SC appointed eight additional members to the SAR drafting team for Project 2020-02 (Modifications to PRC-024 – Generator Ride-through), one more than NERC recommended, to join the team’s current five members.

The goal of the project is to replace PRC-024-003 “with a performance-based ride-through standard that ensures generators remain connected to the bulk power system during system disturbances,” according to a staff presentation. “From a risk-based perspective, the goal of the standard is to mitigate the ongoing and systemic performance issues identified across multiple interconnections and across many disturbances analyzed by NERC and the regions.”

The project stems from the general concern of retiring synchronous generators and their replacement with nonsynchronous resources. But the presentation also notes that “these issues have been identified in inverter-based resources as well as synchronous generators, with many causes of tripping entirely unrelated to voltage and frequency protection settings as dictated by the currently effective version of PRC-024.”

Several stakeholders expressed concern that most of the team was represented by generators, with a lack of reliability experience. When questioned about the one volunteer not recommended by NERC, Harkness said that staff had found the person would “not be a good fit.”

Feliks, however, noted that the committee “typically very much encourages people to be on drafting teams and encourages their participation. So looking at this particular drafting team — and quite honestly I don’t have a dog in this fight — but leaving one person off that’s volunteering; that, based on the resume, has some pretty deep experience in this, it doesn’t seem to make real logical sense.” He moved to include the candidate

Harkness clarified that in interviewing the nominee, staff discovered they were “totally against the project, and so there was no support for the SAR as it was. … When you think about team dynamics, you want to be able to build consensus. … If you jump out of the gate with someone against it, you may not get anywhere.”

Candidates for SAR drafting teams are nonpublic, so committee members could not speak about certain details that would identify the nominee in question, including specifically why they were against the project. Harkness would only say that the person did not think the standard was needed.

Feliks returned to his original point that “anyone who raises their hand [i.e., volunteers], given the fact that we’re running pretty thin, I’m pretty happy with.” But he also said that “part of this vetting process is to make sure industry thinks a standard revision is needed. … So a contrarian opinion on the SAR drafting team: isn’t that kind of the point of this? … The idea that NERC is picking a candidate based on what they want, I kind find a lot of concern with. It’s supposed to be up to the industry.”

This prompted Howard Gugel, NERC vice president of engineering and standards, to chime in. “Hopefully nobody [thinks] that NERC would ever try to stack a drafting team. That is not the intention [with this project] and not anything we would ever do.” The goal in assembling a team is “ensuring a successful project.”

“So while we quite often [recommend] people who have differing opinions, we find that it may be counterproductive to recommend somebody at the onset who is against the project itself,” Gugel said. Based on prior experience, “that tends to get the drafting team bogged down on issues in almost every call that they take.”

He also reminded the committee “of the speed at which we should be adapting to these newer technologies and getting standards out, and I would hate to put someone on a standard drafting team that would cause a year or two[-year] delay on these resources that are causing definite impacts to reliability.”

Other stakeholders voiced agreement with Feliks that there should be a difference of opinion on drafting teams and expressed doubt that the one person could derail an entire project. The committee ended up approving the eighth addition to the team, with five abstentions but no one opposed.