Committee Meets for Second Time in over 2 Years

In its first in-person meeting since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — and its second ever — NERC’s Reliability and Security Technical Committee (RSTC) gathered at the offices of the Midwest Reliability Organization in St. Paul, Minn., this week to advance action on a number of NERC’s projects.

Before Tuesday, the RSTC’s only face-to-face meeting was its first, held in Atlanta more than two and a half years ago, where the group primarily discussed its plans for taking over the business of the now defunct Operations, Planning and Critical Infrastructure Protection committees. (See RSTC Tackles Organization Issues in First Meeting.) On the first day of this week’s meeting, Chair Greg Ford, of Georgia System Operations, reflected that the committee “has come a long way” since it first came together in 2020.

“I think at that point, and over the next year or so, we were still the OC, PC and CIPC, just in a room together. And today based on the discussion it was clear to me that we have become an RSTC,” Ford said. “We’re really thinking across boundaries; we’re trying to bring a cyber connection to everything we do … [which] is what the board asked us to do. We may not be perfect, but we’re certainly getting there.”

The RSTC’s next meeting, which will be held virtually, is scheduled for Dec. 6-7. For next year’s meetings, two will be fully virtual, while the other two in March and September are planned to be in person. The locations for those meetings have not been determined yet; NERC’s Tina Buzzard said the possible cities include Phoenix, Dallas and San Diego.

SPIDER Documents Approved

Three reports from NERC’s System Planning Impacts from Distributed Energy Resources (SPIDER) Working Group came before the committee this week, with members approving all three.

First was the NERC Reliability Standards Review, which SPIDER Chair Shayan Rizvi described as a “foundation” for revising the organization’s reliability standards to account for the recent rapid growth of distributed energy resources on the bulk power system, which is expected to continue in the next few years. Work on the project began in 2020 and involved the review of 78 standards over nearly two years.

SPIDER ultimately determined that 54 standards are not likely to need action of any kind to ensure they remain relevant in light of the spread of DERs. The group recommended revising 11 standards across six families: Resource and Demand Balancing; Emergency Preparedness and Operations; Facilities Design, Connections and Maintenance; Modeling, Data and Analysis; Protection and Control; and Transmission Operations (TOP). Eleven standards were recommended for supplemental reliability guidelines — in the same categories except for TOP — and two are being considered for potential future revision, though no action is needed at this time.

The group also submitted a white paper to the committee concerning the impacts of DERs on undervoltage load shedding (UVLS) programs, which found that DERs “are not expected to significantly affect” such systems. Still, it recommended that utilities ensure resources are modeled appropriately in UVLS studies, as well as a technical report on simulating beyond positive sequence conditions using current industry tools.

The group’s representatives concluded by soliciting volunteers from the RSTC to review another white paper on the impact of battery energy storage systems on DER modeling.

LTRA Previewed

NERC staff working on the ERO’s Long-Term Reliability Assessment (LTRA) said they expect a draft version of the document to be ready for the RSTC’s review by Sept. 26, with a release scheduled by Dec. 15. The LTRA is released every year to assess North American resource adequacy in the next decade and to identify trends that could affect grid reliability and security.

Anna Lafoyiannis, chair of the Reliability Assessment Subcommittee, told attendees that the goal of this year’s assessment is “to be a little bit more concise” than in previous years and “focus on what are the most critical emerging risks … for policymakers and decision-making.” She said the report will focus on two main themes: resource adequacy and energy sufficiency, including capacity shortfalls in Ontario, MISO and California; and extreme weather risks involving insufficient flexible generation in Texas and the Northwest, along with issues with the natural gas infrastructure in New England and other areas.

In response to questions from committee members, Lafoyiannis confirmed that the LTRA will “include a list of recommendations” for policymakers and industry. She added that the RAS is hoping for feedback from the RSTC about whether “those recommendations [are] the right recommendations,” and whether they “are doable and the right priority.”