[EDITOR’S NOTE: A previous version of this story incorrectly called Jonathan Booe the CEO of NAESB. He is COO.]

FERC Chairman Richard Glick and NERC CEO Jim Robb last week asked North American Energy Standards Board (NAESB) leaders to convene a forum to discuss plans to improve natural gas reliability in support of the electric sector and address challenges from gas-electric interdependency.

The request came Friday in a joint letter to NAESB COO Jonathan Booe and Chairman Michael Desselle. It was inspired by the FERC-NERC joint report on the winter storms that hit Texas and the Midwest in February 2021, leading to widespread generation outages, derates or failures to start that caused more than 23 GW of manual firm load shed. (See FERC, NERC Release Final Texas Storm Report.)

The report, released in November, found that natural gas facilities accounted for more than 50% of generation failures, both in terms of the number of units and their total nameplate capacity.

Among the report’s recommendations was that FERC establish “a forum in which representatives of state legislatures and/or regulators with jurisdiction over natural gas infrastructure, in cooperation with [other stakeholders], identify concrete actions … to improve the reliability of the natural gas infrastructure system necessary to support the Bulk Electric System.” Glick and Robb’s letter said that NAESB “is uniquely positioned” to organize such a forum, having “representation from all segments of the supply chain” in the gas and electric markets.

Speaking to ERO Insider on Monday, Booe said the organization was “excited to see the request” and had been “working through the weekend” to develop a response to the letter. While NAESB is not ready to schedule the forum yet, Booe observed that it has many years of experience working to address gas and electric market coordination issues, several times at the request of FERC and often with support from NERC and other stakeholders.

“We know it’s going to be a challenge, but we have faced similar challenges in the past,” Booe said. “So, I think that’s why the commission and NERC, with the support of NARUC [National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners], have put their confidence in us to help establish this forum and try and address some of those findings that were in the report … We have this long history of convening these kinds of diverse groups of interested parties and trying to find consensus positions.”

NAESB has pursued its own response to the February storms, including initiating a standards project aimed at improving gas and electric coordination last December. (See NAESB Starts Gas-electric Coordination Project.) Asked about the progress of this effort on Monday, Booe acknowledged that action had stalled after NAESB was unable to “find consensus from our groups” about the appropriate direction of the project. However, he said the request from Glick and Robb might inspire fresh movement toward new standards from the organization.

NAESB President Rae McQuade told ERO Insider she expected members from across both industries, as well as the regulatory community, would be happy to contribute to the forum, whatever form it takes.

“We have always worked very closely with NARUC, and we’ll certainly do so on this as well,” McQuade said. “And we’ve also got every segment of the wholesale and retail natural gas and electric market representatives as NAESB members. So, I’m sure that a number of our members will be very interested in participating, as well as others.”