NERC’s staff are working on a “postmortem” examining the development of the ERO’s recently approved reliability standard setting ride-through requirements for inverter-based resources to identify lessons for the future, the organization’s vice president of engineering and standards told its Board of Trustees. 

“We’re trying to comprehensively map out a plan forward for the next year,” Soo Jin Kim told trustees at a special board meeting Oct. 8, referring to the work needed to meet the next milestone in FERC Order 901. The order, passed last year, requires NERC to submit standards to improve the reliability of IBRs in three tranches between 2024 and 2026. According to Milestone 3, the ERO must file standards addressing data-sharing and model validation for all IBRs by Nov. 4, 2025. (See NERC Submits IBR Work Plan to FERC.) 

Milestone 2 covered performance requirements and post-event performance validation for registered IBRs, and the standards for this segment must be submitted to FERC by Nov. 4 of this year. Those standards were the main reason for the Oct. 8 board meeting, with trustees unanimously voting to adopt the standards: 

• • PRC-024-4 — Frequency and voltage protection settings for synchronous generators, Type 1 and Type 2 wind resources, and synchronous condensers.  

• • PRC-028-1 — Disturbance monitoring and reporting requirements for inverter-based resources.  

• • PRC-002-5 — Disturbance monitoring and reporting requirements.  

• • PRC-030-1 — Unexpected inverter-based resource event mitigation. 

• • PRC-029-1 — Frequency and voltage ride-through requirements for IBRs. 

All five standards will be submitted to FERC for final approval. 

Kim said NERC’s developers will look to streamline the development cycle for the upcoming milestones by examining their experience on the Milestone 2 standards — especially PRC-029-1, which met significant opposition by industry stakeholders in multiple formal ballot rounds.  

The standard’s failure to achieve the required two-thirds segment weighted approval led the board to exercise for the first time its authority under Section 321 of NERC’s Rules of Procedure to streamline the stakeholder approval process. (See “Board Invokes Standards Authority to Meet IBR Deadline,” NERC Board of Trustees/MRC Briefs: Aug. 15, 2024.) Trustees directed the ERO’s Standards Committee to convene a technical conference to hear feedback from industry, use that input to revise the standard and post the updated standard for another ballot round.  

Board Chair Ken DeFontes praised the work of NERC’s staff adapting to these directives, which required the entire process to be carried out within 45 days (though NERC did extend balloting for PRC-029-1 to give industry more time to review the changes, meaning the results came in several days after the 45-day limit).  

Kim said NERC found the technical conference helpful to identify issues that kept industry from supporting previous versions. She suggested that when developing the Milestone 3 standards, the ERO will proactively call for similar gatherings to “get ahead of several of the technical issues that we see, particularly with regard to modeling.” 

“We’re going to try to have, not just a technical conference, but a working session where we will have breakouts, learn from what transpired during the second milestone, and try to get to the heart of the matter with regards to certain changes that need to be applied to some of the standards,” Kim said. “We agree in concept on what needs to occur with regards to modeling, [but] there’s going to be several technical sessions.” 

The board also voted to accept revisions to the charter of NERC’s Reliability and Security Technical Committee that are intended to improve the balance of industry representation at committee meetings.