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November 8, 2024

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NERC Standards Committee Briefs: Sept. 20, 2023

Leadership Elections

The NERC Standards Committee on Wednesday elected Todd Bennett of Associated Electric Cooperative Inc. and Troy Brumfield of American Transmission Co. as its new chair and vice chair, respectively.

Bennett, managing director of reliability compliance and audit services at AECI, will replace current Chair Amy Casuscelli, of Xcel Energy, beginning next year. When she steps down, Casuscelli will have served as chair for two consecutive two-year terms.

Casuscelli said she would give Bennett a “long, elaborate speech” for her last committee meeting in December, but she did tell him that “the committee is going to be in really good hands under your leadership, so congratulations.”

The committee chose Bennett over Charles Yeung, executive director of interregional affairs for SPP; the vote count was not revealed. Prior to the vote, Yeung said he was not running to oppose Bennett, saying that “Todd would be as good as chair with his experience as I could be. However, I think I would bring to the team a lot of insight from” his experience leading the Project Management and Oversight Subcommittee (PMOS).

Comments about the number of ongoing standards projects and how to prioritize them were sprinkled throughout the committee’s discussions. “I think the primary struggle of standards today is the projects,” Yeung said. “As we heard today, a lot of the concerns are about scheduling and priorities, so that will be a primary driver of leadership of the Standards Committee in the future.”

After Bennett’s election, WECC’s Steve Rueckert nominated Yeung for vice chair to run against Brumfield, manager of reliability standards compliance for ATC, who was running unopposed. Rueckert hedged his nomination on the condition that Yeung wanted to serve in the position, which made Casuscelli laugh, and Yeung say he had “never heard a nomination like that” before accepting.

Committee members also were briefed on their own upcoming elections. The committee is made up of 20 members, comprising two from each sector serving staggered two-year terms; thus, 10 members are up for re-election this year.

Nominations will be accepted from Oct. 3-13, and the election will be held over Nov. 1-13. The results will be announced Nov. 16.

Proposed Update to Supply Chain CIP Standard Deferred

After an hourlong discussion, the committee voted 9-7, with three abstentions, to delay consideration of a NERC-proposed standard authorization request (SAR) to update CIP-013-2 (Cyber Security — Supply Chain Risk Management) pending consultation with the Reliability and Security Technical Committee (RSTC).

Committee members expressed reluctance to approve another standard development project that did not seem urgent and seemed to prescribe one-size-fits-all solutions.

The first version of the standard went into effect in 2020. It requires entities to implement security controls in their supply chains addressing software integrity and authenticity; vendors’ remote access; information system planning; and vendor risk management. An update that went into effect last year extended the requirements to electronic access control or monitoring systems, physical access control systems and protected cyber assets. (See FERC OKs Updated Supply Chain Standards.)

A NERC survey on CIP-013, along with two others addressing cybersecurity that were approved alongside it, in March 2022 showed that although they were helpful, about 40% of respondents were unclear as to what would constitute a violation of the standards’ requirements. (See NERC Reports Mixed Data on Supply Chain Progress.)

“Industry implementation is wide ranging and variable across the ERO Enterprise,” according to the proposed SAR. “The implemented industry supply chain risk processes are ambiguous and generally lack rigor for validating the completeness and accuracy of the data, assessing the risks, considering the vendor’s mitigation activities and documenting and tracking residual risks. … The lack of specificity for correctly identifying and assessing supply chain security risks may lead to incomplete or inaccurate risk evaluations.”

“The threat has changed,” Jamie Calderon, NERC manager of standards development, told the committee. “New attacks have been documented. … How entities are complying with CIP-013 introduces too much room for residual risk.”

But Marty Hostler, reliability compliance manager for Northern California Power Agency, said the SAR seemed to be more about “course-correcting, [so] this seems like a lower priority then. We’ve got well over 30 projects already, and NERC just issued some guidance … on what we should be doing, [which means] it’s already correcting the course.”

“We did not state that it was a high priority,” answered Latrice Harkness, NERC director of standards development. “However, this is something that we need to address for security purposes.”

Hostler was not fully convinced, saying, “It would seem like we need a little … more guidance on what the real issue is, because we’ve got this guidance out there, and I think that’s appropriate.”

Brumfield noted the many instances in which the SAR said the standard “lacks specificity.”

“It’s telling us to drill down and be more prescriptive,” he said.

“I’m a little [conflicted] on whether this should go forward or not,” Yeung said. “On one hand, there’s gaps” in the standard. “The concern I have is, will this SAR be successful? Because from a PMOS perspective, we’ve got so many [projects] already. … So I want to make sure this SAR is amenable to industry to move forward.”

Hostler moved that the committee send it to the appropriate RSTC subcommittee for technical review, which ultimately was approved.

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Federal Budgets, Procurements to Include Social Cost of GHGs

President Joe Biden has directed all federal agencies to incorporate the social cost of greenhouse gases (SC-GHG) into a range of key processes, from developing and implementing their budget and procurement processes to environmental reviews required under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

“The Office of Management and Budget recently estimated that climate-related disasters could increase annual federal spending by over $100 billion and decrease annual federal revenue by up to $2 trillion by the end of the century,” according to a White House fact sheet on the announcement, released Thursday.

“By calculating the costs of climate change impacts on sectors like agriculture, public health, labor productivity and more, the SC-GHG allows better comparisons to other costs and benefits of agency decisions that may also be presented in dollar figures,” the fact sheet said. “And because the SC-GHG estimates the societal cost of the effects of various greenhouse gas pollutants emitted at distinct points in time, its use facilitates the comparison of alternative policies with different emissions profiles.”

The SC-GHG could be used to put a dollar amount on both the damages caused by GHG emissions and the benefits of measures to reduce them, the fact sheet says.

The president’s action represents “the first time this ‘whole of government approach’ is [being] used to evaluate the climate consequences of government actions,” Richard Revesz, director of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, told The New York Times on Thursday.

The impact of the directive could be significant, as the fact sheet notes the U.S. government is the largest single purchaser of goods and services in the world, “spending over $630 billion per year … [with] the ability to move markets, invest in new ideas and act as a model contracting partner.”

“By integrating the SC-GHG into procurement … the federal government can reduce emissions while saving taxpayer dollars, both in the short term through reduced energy consumption and in the long term by helping to reduce the most catastrophic effects of the climate crisis.”

A recent analysis from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that so far this year, the U.S. has weathered 23 weather and climate disasters that caused more than $1 billion in damages.

The SC-GHG can be used to calculate emission reductions of proposed federal programs or actions compared to baseline GHG emissions of existing programs or projects. Agencies then can incorporate these calculations into “other considerations that inform and justify their budget proposals,” the fact sheet said.

Federal agencies also could use the procurement of “large, durable, energy-consuming products and systems” as pilots for incorporating the SC-GHG into their purchases, as was done by the U.S. Postal Service in its decision to increase its order of electric delivery vans from 40 to 75% of new purchases.

The social cost of carbon (SCC)  already has been incorporated in NEPA evaluations under guidelines the White House Council on Environmental Quality issued this year.

How Much is The SC-GHG?

The fact sheet does not specify any figures that federal agencies might use as they incorporate the SC-GHG into their processes and evaluations. The figure has fluctuated from around $51/ton of carbon emissions, set during the Obama administration, to $7/ton under former President Donald Trump, according to the EPA. The Biden administration returned the figure to $51, and EPA has proposed, but not finalized, a new figure of $190/ton.

Shortly after his inauguration, Biden also established an Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases, which in 2021 released a report with a wider range of values for the social costs of different greenhouse gases. For example, the SCC ran from $14 to $152/ton, depending on diverse variables. The low end of the social cost of methane was $670/ton, versus a high of $3,900/ton.

A group of Republican states, led by Louisiana, has been fighting the administration’s use of the SCC in federal processes but was turned back by federal appeals court decisions in 2022 and again in April 2023. The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear the case.

Initial reactions from the environmental community were positive.

David Doniger, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the administration’s action a “common-sense decision to assess how the federal government’s spending and investments will affect the climate crisis. Given the impacts from heat, storms and flooding that the nation has experienced this year, it’s clear that it’s long past time to consider the full impact of the federal government’s actions on the climate. This is an important step to do that.”

Responses on Capitol Hill split predictably along party lines.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), ranking member of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, criticized the Biden administration for using “unproven figures to attempt to justify its environmental policies that drive up costs for families, hamstring American employers and delay job-creating infrastructure projects from ever moving forward. Today’s announcement is more of the same devastating, top-down government mandates intended to kill energy jobs and make the United States more reliant on foreign countries.”

“This is a very big deal,” countered Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), chair of the Senate Budget Committee. “The Biden administration’s decision will put the full weight of federal government decisions into fighting climate change. … [The U.S.] will begin factoring the true costs of carbon pollution into a wide array of government actions, cutting back on taxpayers’ bills for climate-related disasters over the long term.”

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Déjà Vu as FERC, NERC Issue Recommendations over Holiday Outages

FERC and NERC staff presented their initial recommendations from their joint inquiry into the widespread electric outages last Christmas, which include completing development of winterization standards and improving reliability of natural gas infrastructure.

The report includes 11 recommendations to prevent similar events, such as Winter Storm Uri in 2021, when much of Texas was without power for days and hundreds died.

“This is the fifth time in 11 years that we’ve had a winter-related weather event where we had significant generator losses,” FERC Chairman Willie Phillips said. “But this time it was unprecedented: Nearly 90,000 megawatts and nearly 80% of the generating units failed to perform at temperatures above the unit’s own documented minimum operating temperature.”

As in previous winter events, the natural gas system also suffered, with production from the Marcellus and Utica shale regions falling by as much as 54%, which led to low pipeline pressures that nearly spelled disaster for New York City at the height of winter.

“We’re talking about — if pressure does not return — going house to house to house, apartment to apartment, to relight pilots; just the act of doing this would take months,” Phillips said at his post-meeting press conference. “And this event happened in December. A little bit of winter comes through in New York in January and February. It would have been catastrophic. Everyone should be concerned enough to act on this report, and the recommendations when they come out, immediately.”

NERC CEO Jim Robb was at the press conference, and he echoed Phillip’s concerns about how much a near miss Winter Storm Elliot proved to be.

“We were fortunate in that this was a relatively short-lived cold weather event,” Robb said. “And it warmed up on Christmas Day. Had it not, ConEd certainly would have been in the soup. It was also a storm that was centered in [the] western third of the Eastern Interconnection. And if it had been a couple hundred miles further east, New England would have had real catastrophic events.”

Robb noted that it took the 2003 Blackout in the Eastern Interconnection to get Congress to approve a mandatory reliability regime. He said he hoped the prospect of millions of New Yorkers being without heat at the height of winter will produce some action on natural gas reliability.

The report calls on Congress and states to enact legislation setting up reliability rules for the natural gas systems from the wellhead through the pipeline requiring cold weather preparedness plans, freeze protection plans and operating measures for extreme cold. That legislation should set up regional natural gas communications coordinators like the reliability coordinators for the power system, and it would need to designate critical natural gas infrastructure to be protected from any load shedding that grid operators use in emergencies.

Asked to comment on its near miss, Consolidated Edison pointed to a press release it issued at 6:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve calling for emergency conservation because of problems at pipelines serving New York that it did not own.

“We asked customers to conserve; switched our electric/steam generation plants to alternative fuels and relied on LNG and CNG,” said spokesman Allan Drury. “On Christmas morning, our region’s temperatures were a bit higher than expected and gas supplies were adequate.”

The company did not respond to a request for comment on the call for gas reliability rules.

The natural gas trade groups did not want to discuss the report, which is preliminary; FERC and NERC plan to release a final report later this fall. But the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, which represents pipelines, did throw some cold water on the idea of a mandatory reliability regime for the industry.

“A reliability organization for interstate natural gas pipelines is the wrong approach to addressing the reliability problems identified during the discussion at today’s FERC meeting,” said INGAA CEO Amy Andryszak. “FERC exercises strict oversight of interstate natural gas pipelines and has promulgated regulations governing everything from construction to reporting of operational information to rates. As a result, interstate natural gas pipelines have a strong record of delivering on their firm commitments, even in extreme weather. There is no pervasive reliability problem across interstate natural gas pipelines like the electric reliability problems that led to the creation of NERC.”

Commissioner James Danly said a big part of the problem was the lack of infrastructure — and that FERC was largely to blame. While electricity is fundamental to the economy, it is not the only customer for natural gas, and customers need to pay for service, he said.

“There seems to be this assumption that it is entirely for the purpose of driving the electric reliability that the gas system should reorganize itself,” Danly said. “And I think that even if that were the right way to go about things and the best public policy to implement, they get to have a say in how their own systems are used because we still have private property in this country, even in a regulatory regime.”

The power industry has seen a major shift since the 1990s, when just 10% of generation was natural gas and that was for peaking, said Commissioner Mark Christie. Now 50% is natural gas and the bulk of that operates as baseload, he noted.

“Recommendation number seven says study whether we need more infrastructure,” Christie said. “I think this frivolous. Of course, we do. Of course, we do. You can’t turn your whole system from gas as a discrete peaker use and then make gas combined cycles your main baseload generation and not need more infrastructure.”

Commissioner Allison Clements noted that some natural gas utilities were unable to heat customers’ homes for up to eight days, but she questioned the need to build out more pipelines in response.

“We could come in and say we need more infrastructure, but the infrastructure that was there didn’t work,” Clements said. “From the production head through generation, we saw failures. We need to focus on the part we have jurisdiction over now, and industry needs to lean in, whichever part of the industry you’re in, to cut through some of these problems.”

Both Phillips and Robb said they have been arguing in favor of a new reliability regime for natural gas, and improved coordination between the two industries, for years.

“I think the issue we have in this country is that our recognition of the relationship between the natural gas system and the electric system hasn’t caught up to the realities of how those two systems are intertwined,” Robb said.

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Enbridge Announces Project to Increase Northeast Pipeline Capacity

Enbridge is soliciting requests for service as part of a natural gas pipeline expansion project that would significantly increase capacity to the Northeast, the company said in an open season notice issued this month.

The company said the project would expand capacity on the Algonquin gas system by up to 500,000 Dth/d at the Ramapo, N.Y., receipt point at the western end of the pipeline and 250,000 Dth/d at the Salem, Mass., receipt point at the eastern end. The total current capacity of the Algonquin system is just over 3 million Dth/d.

“Project Maple will provide much-needed supply reliability during peak daily demand, while stabilizing energy prices in the region and supporting New England’s continued journey to Net Zero,” Enbridge wrote in the open season notice.

The company said natural gas demand in New England has continued to grow, and it anticipates demand from local distribution companies increasing by 6.5% over the next five years, based on an analysis prepared for ISO-NE by ICF.

“Project scope will be comprised of a combination of replacing existing smaller diameter pipe with larger diameter pipe, extending pipeline loops in parallel to existing pipeline facilities, and adding compression at existing compressor stations, depending on subscribed volumes,” Enbridge wrote.

The open season process is a required step to demonstrate project demand to FERC. The process “seeks to identify parties desiring to obtain firm transportation service” and is open through Nov. 17. Enbridge’s target in-service date for the project is “as early as November 2029.”

Enbridge map of Project Maple and the Algonquin gas system. | Enbridge

“Through Project Maple, we’re seeking to increase capacity on our system to meet growing demand in the region from gas utilities, as well as for power generation,” said Max Bergeron, manager of stakeholder relations at Enbridge. “FERC has held technical conferences which have highlighted the power grid reliability concerns the region continues to face, and Project Maple is one solution which seeks to meet the need for reliable access to fuel for power generation, in addition to supporting growing demand from gas utilities.”

The proposal comes as many Northeast states are studying how to rapidly reduce the emissions resulting from the gas network and gas combustion. Natural gas primarily is made up of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and is responsible for a large portion of the heating, electricity and industrial emissions in the region.

“Continuing the infrastructure and supply of methane is counter to our states’ climate goals; introduces hazards both from the inevitable leaks and the contributions to our enormous greenhouse gas load; and leaves rate payers, who cannot afford a clean energy transition, holding the ever-increasing bills,” said Judith Black, a climate organizer who lives in a neighboring town to Salem. “’Bad idea’ doesn’t begin to describe the Maple Project.”

In Weymouth, Mass., local community groups still are fighting to shut down a controversial Enbridge compressor station, which came online in 2021, because of climate, health and safety concerns.

“We do not anticipate adding any additional compression at the Weymouth Compressor Station as part of this project,” Bergeron said, adding the additional gas at the Salem receipt point would enter via the Maritimes & Northeast Pipeline at the western end of the system.

Alice Arena, director of Fore River Residents Against the Compressor Station, expressed dismay at the expansion plan, and called upon Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey’s administration to block the project.

“If Maura Healey and her administration want to claim to be climate champions, this is where you stake that claim,” Arena said, adding that the proposal is incompatible with the need to rapidly reduce emissions.

“People cannot wrap their minds around where we are at in terms of climate,” Arena said. “It’s too hard to think about your children starving to death. It’s too hard to think about older people dying of the heat. It’s too hard to think about half of Boston being underwater.”

Enbridge may face a more difficult regulatory landscape than it did during the construction of the Weymouth Compressor. The state’s 2021 “Next Generation Roadmap” climate act enshrined protections for environmental justice populations into law, requiring enhanced public participation and environmental impact analyses for projects that affect state-designated environmental justice communities.

Over the past decade, Enbridge has successfully pushed through two pipeline expansion projects in the region — the Atlantic Bridge and Algonquin Incremental Market projects — but the proposed Access Northeast Project stalled because of lack of funding.

Joe LaRusso, a senior advocate at the Acadia Center, told RTO Insider the Maple Project likely will need to rely on firm contracts with the region’s local distribution companies to demonstrate demand for the project. Enbridge’s announcement noted that New England gas generators have firm contracts for only a small percentage of the gas needed to operate at full capacity, a dynamic the company called an “untenable disconnect” that raises energy prices and hurts grid reliability.

“Will the Project Maple AGTP expansion project succeed? Impossible to say,” LaRusso wrote on social media site Mastodon. “One thing IS certain: When it comes to fossil gas pipelines in New England, everything that’s old is new again.”

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NERC Reliability and Security Technical Committee Approves DER Research

NERC‘s Reliability and Security Technical Committee on Wednesday approved a whitepaper looking into the effects of distributed energy resources and their aggregations on the bulk power system. The whitepaper includes insights and high-level recommendations, including which security controls could be implemented and which they can avoid.

NERC is considering the issue as FERC Order 2222 is implemented, which requires all ISO/RTOs to open their markets to DER aggregations.

DERs also were the subject of an SAR (Standard Authorization Request), which failed to pass at the meeting Wednesday. The SAR would have required system operators to report the number of DERs that go offline during bulk power system defaults. They do have to report conventional supply that goes offline and DERs have been affected by grid disturbances in recent years.

NERC is trying to get an idea of how big an issue DERs present during bulk power system faults, said its Director of Reliability Assessments John Moura. The grid’s transition to more intermittent resources was covered with a couple of items at the meeting.

The committee voted to approve NERC’s Electric-Gas Working Group to support a study of whether regions have enough natural gas to meet the increased ramping needs intermittent resources produce until the capabilities of storage increase, or some other flexible and emissions-free technology gets to market.

The study was recommended by the North American Energy Standards Board’s Gas-Electric Harmonization Forum. (See NAESB Forum Chairs Push for Gas Reliability Organization.)

The EGWG also won approval of a guideline meant to ensure that registered entities have enough information to plan for procurement of enough natural gas to serve load as the use of the just-in-time fuel grows because of the need to balance renewables and the retirement of coal- and oil-fired power plants. The guideline will help them understand fuel supply chain risks and offer additional conditions and constraints, especially during extreme weather events.
The committee also heard details about another proposed SAR that would require transmission planners to use scenarios that include extreme weather, DER events, stress the interdependencies between power and gas and are cyber-informed. NERC’s Board of Trustees required the development of the SAR at its November 2022 meeting.

One question that was brought up is where to cut the off the standard because even if the transmission grid is “gold-plated,” natural disasters still will lead to outages.

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Climate Alliance Seeks to Boost Heat Pump Sales

A coalition of 25 governors on Thursday committed to a goal of 20 million heat pumps operating in their states by 2030.

The announcement was part of a series of decarbonization announcements by the U.S. Climate Alliance during Climate Week NYC.

Reaching that target would quadruple the number of heat pumps in those states.

The heat pump initiative is part of the Alliance’s goal of promoting new zero-emission construction while eliminating emissions from existing buildings.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D), a co-chair and founding member of the Alliance, said Thursday the effort is simple to understand:

“We want to be warm in the winter, and we want to be cool in the summer, and we want to prevent the climate from collapsing all year long,” he said. “There is no better invention in human history to do those three things than a heat pump.”

Heat pumps have gained momentum among consumers in recent years, and U.S. sales outpaced gas furnaces for the first time in 2022.

Heat pumps are substantially more efficient than traditional heating and cooling systems and can be significantly less expensive to operate. Tax incentives, utility rebates and promotional campaigns have helped boost sales.

But the upfront costs can be significant, particularly if other upgrades to the housing unit are needed.

As with many other energy transition and climate protection initiatives, Thursday’s announcement included economic justice and environmental justice components.

The heat pump initiative will be targeted in part at people who might have difficulty paying for the work.

The governors said the alliance supports an equitable transition to zero-emissions buildings by accelerating efficiency retrofits of homes and businesses, particularly for low-income families.

“We want to ensure that at least 40 percent of the benefits flow into disadvantaged communities,” said New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D). “We could never leave people behind.”

The governors also said they would support development of zero-emission building codes and standards; seek innovative solutions to complex issues such as volatile energy prices, grid reliability and climate resilience; build a workforce for the clean energy transition; maximize federal funding streams; and lead by example, reducing emissions from state-owned structures.

Directly and indirectly, buildings account for about a third of greenhouse gas emissions. Increasing their efficiency and decreasing their carbon footprint is central to global climate protection efforts but also can provide benefits locally, through improved air quality and resulting improvements in public health.

The Alliance says its 24 states and one territory are home to 54% of the U.S. population and account for 58% of its economic output but are responsible for only 41% of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. Their clean energy workforce is 40% larger than that of the other 26 states.

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SERC to be ‘Well Represented’ in ITCS Group

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — SERC Reliability’s Tim Ponseti said Wednesday that the regional entity’s stakeholders will be “well represented” in the group advising the ERO on the congressionally mandated Interregional Transfer Capability Study (ITCS).

“We … have six major reliability coordinators at play within the SERC footprint, and each of those are around 45,000 MW [of] peak load or more,” Ponseti, the RE’s vice president of operations, said at SERC’s Board of Directors meeting Wednesday. “So you can see the significance.”

The ITCS was a significant focus of the meeting, reflecting the urgency with which the ERO views the task. Congress ordered the study in June as part of the Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA), requiring NERC and the REs to submit a report to FERC by December 2024 on the total transfer capability between neighboring regions, additions to transfer capability that could improve grid reliability and recommendations to meet and maintain total transfer capability. (See FERC Approves NERC Transfer Study Funding Request.)

Tim Ponseti, SERC | © RTO Insider LLC

SERC and the other regions are central to the study process, Ponseti said as he explained the organization of the study. The ERO Executive Leadership Group will be in overall control of the project; Ponseti said he and his counterparts from other REs will serve on this body, led by Mark Lauby, NERC’s chief engineer.

Two teams will serve below the executive group: the ERO Project Team, led by NERC Director of Reliability Assessment and Performance Analysis John Moura, and the ITCS Advisory Group, comprising industry stakeholders who will provide advice and input on the study scope, approach, results and recommendations. Ponseti said the makeup of the advisory group should be announced “in the next week or two,” and that SERC stakeholders will comprise “a fourth or a fifth” of participants.

The FRA specified that the ERO’s study is to be based on the transmission planning regions identified in FERC Order 1000. However, Ponseti noted that the order “came out some time ago” and several of the regions have “shifted, merged, combined [or] split” in the following years. He did not go into detail about how the team would account for these changes, saying only that members would “be taking it as we feel appropriate from an electrical standpoint.”

Congress mandated that the ITCS is to be based on the transmission planning regions identified in FERC Order 1000. | SERC Reliability

While NERC and the regions are moving ahead at full speed with the study, there are potential stumbling blocks ahead. Rebecca Poulsen, SERC’s assistant general counsel, noted that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) introduced a bill in July (S.2443) containing language that would repeal the order for the ITCS in the FRA.

Poulsen said that “we’re not concerned about” the prospect of the bill passing before the deadline for the study arrives. But she said that it was important to remember “there are still some political discussions going on about whether the study should be done or who should be doing the study.”

Director Roger Clark, of Associated Electric Cooperative Inc., said he recognized that “transfer capability is a tool to solve reliability” and supported the aims of the study. However, he also pointed out that “transfer studies have been done forever” and that transfer capability is just a single part of an equation that also must consider elements such as the cost of building the required transfer capacity. Noting that Ponseti said the study would not recommend specific projects, he asked if any “cost allocation implications [would] come into this process.”

“It’s certainly not going to be the objective of this … study to say, ‘Build a 5-million-kV line from point A to point B.’ It’s going to be broader than that,” Ponseti replied. “It will say, ‘We need 2,000 MW of additional transfer capability, or 5,000 MW,’ [for example]. The how, when, why and how it gets paid for will be left for future discussion.” Later he added that “it’s not just megawatts.”

Ponseti also emphasized that the ERO hopes for the ITCS to have a long-term impact, echoing Moura’s assurance earlier this year that the intent is “not just to submit to FERC and do nothing” in the aftermath. (See NERC Confident in Ability to Deliver ITCS On Time.)

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NERC Panel Disbands EMP Working Group, OKs Guidance on Grid-forming Storage

NERC’s Reliability and Security Technical Committee decided Wednesday to suspend planning for the impact of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that could result from a nuclear attack.

The RSTC voted to disband its EMP Working Group after four years, finding that other risks to grid reliability have taken precedence, diverting resources and expertise from the working group and causing participation to drop. (See p. 55 of meeting materials.)

The electromagnetic pulse caused by the detonation of a nuclear weapon can disrupt or damage electronic circuitry. The task force was formed following the Electric Power Research Institute’s 2019 report on EMPs, which concluded that a high-altitude nuclear explosion could cause a multistate electric outage but not the nationwide, monthslong blackout some observers have warned of.

President Trump in March 2019 ordered a governmentwide effort to protect against this threat. NERC responded by establishing the EMP Task Force, and later the EMP Working Group.

At Wednesday’s RSTC meeting, the working group’s former chair, Aaron Shaw of American Electric Power, said initial response was strong — as many as 70 to 80 people were participating in the group regularly. (See Standing-room Only for NERC EMP Meeting.)

But other issues bearing on grid reliability began to take priority, he said, including inverter-based resources, cyber and physical attacks, distributed energy resources and extreme weather.

“What we started noticing in 2022 is that EMP fell off the Risk Report as an emerging risk that needed to be addressed,” Shaw said. Utilities diverted subject-matter experts to other emerging issues, which led federal agencies to disengage as well.

“Very quickly we had all these monthly calls with all these sub-teams and nobody was participating,” he added.

Some attendees at Wednesday’s meeting questioned the move to stop assessing the EMP threat, given current international tensions.

There is a lot of work yet to be done, Shaw agreed, but the momentum to do it has been lost. Individual utilities and agencies can continue on their own.

The vote to disband was 93% to 4%.

The working group can be reconvened relatively quickly if needed. Its work to date will be archived for industry reference, but because it is not complete, it will not be approved or endorsed by the RSTC.

White Paper Green Lighted

The committee also approved the Inverter-Based Resource Performance Subcommittee’s white paper on functional specifications for grid-forming battery energy storage systems connected to the bulk power system. (See p. 95.)

The paper is intended to help transmission planners determine whether interconnected BESS can be considered a grid-forming resource based on its performance.

At the RSTC’s June meeting, the paper bogged down in a debate over whether its wording connoted a suggestion or a directive. It was tabled then, and numerous technical revisions subsequently were made.

Even so, commenters Wednesday suggested fine-tuning the wording to make it clear that this is a white paper, not a directive.

The RSTC voted to approve the paper as it was revised, 90% to 7%.

White Paper Red Flagged

Semantics were an issue again Wednesday on another white paper on using cloud-based computing technology in grid operations. (See p. 236.)

Several speakers — some of them with self-deprecating remarks about their age or understanding of cloud technology — said they are not comfortable with the idea of combining critical operations into a single off-site location.

Not surprisingly, they also did not want it to appear that the RSTC was endorsing a move to cloud-based operations by offering guidance for doing so.

Discussion was paused for lunch, during which staff made revisions. When the meeting reconvened, objections were raised about the placement of a period in a sentence and a plural-vs.-singular construction.

The white paper was rejected in a tie vote.

Further revisions will be made to address the concerns and the matter will be put to a vote again via email.

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Calif. Governor: ‘Climate Crisis is a Fossil Fuel Crisis’

For the world to have any hope of limiting climate change to 1.5 degrees Celsius, well-off countries around the globe must stop burning coal by 2030 and cut emissions economywide to net zero no later than 2040, according to the United Nations’ Accelerated Climate Action Agenda.

Those aggressive goals were the centerpiece of the opening plenary of the UN Climate Ambition Summit in New York City on Wednesday, with Secretary General António Guterres calling out governments and business for “foot dragging, arm twisting and the naked greed of entrenched interests” that have slowed efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

“Humanity has opened the gates of hell,” Guterres said, reeling off a growing list of climate disasters: floods, wildfires and extreme heat. “Climate action is dwarfed by the scale of the challenge. If nothing changes, we are heading towards a 2.8-degree temperature rise, towards a dangerous and unstable world.”

Setting the stage for the UN Climate Conference (COP 28) in the United Arab Emirates in December, Guterres also called for an end to subsidies for fossil fuels worldwide, which the International Monetary Fund (IMF) pegged at $7 trillion in 2022.

UN Secretary General António Guterres | United Nations

Instead, the accelerated agenda shifts fossil fuel subsidies to renewable energy and ends all licensing and public and private funding for new oil, coal and gas. Targets for developing nations are 2040 for coal phaseout and 2050 for economywide net zero.

“Governments must push the global financial system towards supporting climate action, and that means putting a price on carbon and overhauling the business models of multilateral development banks so that they leverage far more private finance at a reasonable cost to developing countries,” Guterres said.

Businesses and financial institutions also must embark on true net-zero pathways, he said. “Shady pledges have betrayed the public trust … using wealth and influence to delay, distract and deceive, and this is shameful.”

Part of the UN General Assembly, the Climate Ambition Summit plenary laid out the issues and potential flashpoints that will resurface at COP 28 as the nations that signed the Paris climate accords in 2015 face the first official global stocktaking of the world’s progress on climate, required by the agreement.

The UN’s initial global stocktaking report, released Sept. 8, said global action on cutting GHG emissions is lagging, and limiting climate change to 1.5 degrees would mean a 43% drop in emissions by 2030 and a 60% drop by 2035. (See UN Report Calls for Quicker Global Emissions Reductions.)

But concerns about progress at COP 28 already are high in some quarters as the U.A.E. has named Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., as the conference president. Speaking at a climate conference in Brussels in July, Al Jaber called for an accelerated “phasedown” of fossil fuels, as opposed to a phaseout, supported by a tripling in the deployment of renewables and a doubling of energy efficiency.

“Phasedown” also was the language used by G20 energy transition ministers in the final document coming out of their meeting in India in July, in which disagreements were noted about the extent and nature of any future phasedown.

Pairing emission cuts with increased renewables and energy efficiency is gaining support. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said the European Union is working with Al Jaber, Kenya, Barbados and other countries to build a global consensus on the renewable energy and energy efficiency targets ahead of COP 28.

Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation

Guterres billed the summit as an event to recognize the efforts of the nations and organizations moving ahead on ambitious climate action, while also signaling frustration with major polluters, including the United States and China, which were not invited to speak.

However, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) earned strong applause for his indictment of major oil companies, following the state’s suit filed Friday against Exxon, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP and the American Petroleum Institute, an industry trade group. (See Calif. Sues Oil Majors over Climate Impacts.)

California Gov. Gavin Newsom | United Nations

“It’s time for us to be a lot more clear this climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis,” Newsom said. “It’s not complicated. It’s the burning of oil; it’s the burning of gas; it’s the burning of coal, and we need to call that out. For decades and decades, the oil industry has been playing each and every one of us in this room for fools. They’ve been buying off politicians. They’ve been denying and delaying science and fundamental information that they were privy to that they did not share.”

Echoing Newsom, Chilean President Gabriel Boric said, “We have to leave fossil fuel behind, and that, in very specific terms, means that we also have to react to the greenwashing that major businesses are undertaking. They continue with that greenwashing, and they’re stepping it up. In some cases, their greenwashing efforts are supported by countries.

“If we’re not able to make these groups yield to our will and to make them yield to the will of the international community as expressed by the leaders here present and by the activists here … the truth is that we won’t hit our targets.”

Prime Minister Kausea Natano of the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, believes the way forward must include “a comprehensive, multilateral framework that addresses the climate crisis at each root cause. A negotiated fossil fuel nonproliferation treaty would complement the Paris agreement and ensure a global [energy] transition.”

Von der Leyen also promoted wider adoption of carbon pricing as a way to raise money to support clean energy transitions in developing nations. In addition to cutting emissions 55% by 2030, the EU also will work with the UN “to have at least 60% of global emissions covered by carbon pricing by 2030,” she said.

“Today, it’s only 23% [of emissions] that are covered, and this brings in revenue already of $95 billion. Just imagine [if] we could cover 60% of global greenhouse gas emissions, the amount of revenues that we would get to invest in low- and middle-income countries.”

Restructuring Global Finance

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau credited his country’s carbon pricing with GHG emissions that have been trending down since 2019, even as Canada continues to be a major fossil fuel exporter.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau | United Nations

The country has a plan for cutting emissions 40% by 2030, that “goes sector by sector, laying out exactly how we will cut our emissions,” he said. “By the end of the year, we will be announcing our framework to cap emissions from the oil and gas sector.”

Regulations on cutting methane emissions from the oil and gas sector 75% below 2012 levels also are being prepared and “will be designed to help us exceed this already ambitious target,” he said.

Gustavo Petro, president of Colombia, another major fossil fuel exporter, argued for a more radical approach to the phaseout of oil and gas, recognizing first the enormous economic and political power of the industry.

Even the goal of net zero is not viable, Petro said, because “the natural absorption capacity of the planet and the oceans, the forests, the jungles is decreasing, so net zero doesn’t really exist.”

Phasing out fossil fuels will require changing the economic structures of countries, like Colombia, that are dependent on the industry, Petro said.  “Capital needs to be essentially separated from economic interests where fossil fuels are concerned.

“You need to compensate oil- and gas-producing countries for plugging their deposits, [for] no longer plundering them,” he said. “Rather you need to give them money for mitigation and adaptation. That finance won’t come from a private capital market. These major financial resources can only be produced if we restructure the global financial system.”

A strong advocate for the restructuring of global finance, Mia Mottley, prime minister of Barbados, said, “The reality is that developed countries are going to have to find new mechanisms and new forms of carbon taxes while looking [to] ensure that there is not consequential impact that is incapable of being borne on cost of living. …

“Equally, developing countries will need a new mechanism to reduce the costs of hedging the billions of inward investment required,” she said. “We believe that the [tripling] of the multilateral development bank lending is critical.”

Prime Minster Mia Mottley of Barbados | United Nations

Mottley also hammered on the importance of a well-capitalized loss and damage fund, to compensate developing countries with low GHG emissions for the damage they’ve sustained from climate change. The establishment of a loss and damage fund was a major outcome of COP 27 in Egypt last year, but getting countries or companies to contribute to the fund will be one of the key challenges at COP 28.

“It is painful to continue to see that you are asking us to increase borrowing to build resilient infrastructure for something that we did not do,” Mottley said. “And then at the same time, you want to ensure that you have a loss and damage fund that does not have the adequate means for grant funding to be able to help countries to rebuild. It is unconscionable.”

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New England TOs Propose Asset Condition Project Database

The New England Transmission Owners outlined a proposal for a new asset condition project database at ISO-NE’s Planning Advisory Committee on Wednesday.

The proposal came in response to requests from the New England States Committee on Electricity (NESCOE) for broad changes to the asset condition project process. (See States Press New England TOs on Asset Condition Projects.)

Asset condition projects target existing transmission infrastructure that is aging, defunct or otherwise in need of repair. Costs for asset condition projects in New England have ballooned in recent years and now make up the majority of new transmission spending in the region.

The proposed database would provide ISO-NE and the public with information on age, number of structures, inspection timing, and structure material and construction type for pool transmission facility (PTF) lines. The database also would provide new information on transformers, including operating voltages, age, and testing and inspection information.

The TOs’ presentation noted that future additions to the database could include metrics on asset health, more granular data on the age of structures and information on other PTF infrastructure, including control houses, circuit breakers and relays.

“We wanted to provide something that is impactful by the end of the year, and we will look into providing information on some of these additional elements at a later time,” said Eversource Energy’s Robin Lafayette, also representing TOs Avangrid, National Grid, Rhode Island Energy, VELCO and Versant Power.

Lafayette added that developing the asset health metric will take some time and that the TOs will need to be sensitive regarding confidential infrastructure information.

In a July letter to the TOs, NESCOE wrote that the “database should provide a comprehensive view of all information necessary to guide and inform holistic asset condition prioritization and decision-making.”

Beyond the database, NESCOE also recommended the TOs develop asset condition project spending plans, standardize the stakeholder review process and develop a criteria-based approach for asset condition solutions.

“The pace and scale of recent asset condition projects demonstrate the time urgency of such reforms,” NESCOE wrote. “By taking time now to slow down and establish a transparent and predictable asset condition process, New England can move toward work on a right-sizing approach — an important part of holistic planning that will allow for efficient transmission investment at the pace and scale needed for the region’s clean energy future.”