Independent Experts Findings Ed Ernst, John Meyer, Brian Silverstein - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Independent Experts’ Findings

Ed Ernst, John Meyer, Brian Silverstein and Bill Thompson, Independent Experts Valerie Agnew, NERC Director of Standards Development

August 15, 2013

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Key Findings - Gaps

• Four high-priority gaps identified
• Outage coordination
• Governor frequency response
• Situational awareness
• Clear requirements for three-part communication
• Three medium-priority gaps identified
• Verification of accuracy of planning models
• Short circuit/fault duty models
• Infrastructure maintenance
• Additional gaps identified at the requirement level

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Key Findings - Gaps

• Four high-priority gaps identified
• Outage coordination
• Governor frequency response
• Situational awareness framework (May be addressed in Project 2009-02)
• EMS RTCA models, etc.
• Clear requirements for three-part communication (Presented to Board)
• Three medium-priority gaps identified
• Verification of accuracy of planning models (Addressed in MOD B)
• Short circuit/fault duty models (Addressed in MOD B)
• Infrastructure maintenance
• Additional gaps identified at the requirement level

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Key Findings - Gaps

• Outage coordination
• The IRO, EOP and TOP standards do not provide a clear requirement for
• utage coordination to occur.
• Outage coordination (of both generation and transmission) sets up the

system for reliable real-time operations.

• Outage coordination needs to extend out for several years.
• Recommendation: Develop a requirement to address outage coordination.
• Proposed “Authority Standard” requires coordination:
• R7. Each Reliability Coordinator (RC) shall have the authority and responsibility to

develop and implement a generation and transmission outage coordination process across Transmission Operators (TOPs) and Balancing Authorities (BAs) in their footprint. The authority may be delegated (not the responsibility).

• R8. Each RC shall have the authority and responsibility to develop and implement a

generation and transmission outage coordination process between its adjacent RCs.

• R9. The outage coordination process described in R7 and R8 shall cover the time period

from the current operating hour out through at least 36 months.

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Key Findings - Gaps

• Governor frequency response
• Adequate governor response is fundamental to adequate Interconnection-

wide frequency management. The Independent Experts (IE) team believes there can be an issue related to the geographic dispersal of frequency responsive resources within an interconnection and there is a need to verify appropriate frequency response resources.

• The new BAL standards require a certain level of frequency performance

but do not contain a specific requirement for governor response on the Generator Owner (GO)/Operator (GOP).

• BAL-001-2 addresses Real Power Balancing Performance CPS1 and BAAL
• BAL-003-1 addresses Frequency Response Measure (FRM) and Frequency Bias

Setting

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• Governor frequency response (cont’d)
• Approved Planning Committee research recommends the development of

a guideline.

• 2013 NERC State of Reliability Report: frequency response has been steady

for past three years.

• Recommendation: Expand the completed research to address geographic

dispersal and verification of governor frequency response resources in a whitepaper with a subsequent determination whether a standard is necessary for accountability. Determine appropriate role for BAs, GOPs, RCs and TOPs.

Key Findings - Gaps

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Key Findings - Gaps

• Situational awareness framework
• The standards do not provide specific language for real time operators

(BAs, TOPs, RCs) to have proper real time situational awareness.

• The September 2011 SW blackout pointed out the need for proper real

time situational awareness tools and processes.

• Recommendation: Develop a standard that defines the requirements for

EMS RTCA models or the performance expectations of the models.

• Project 2009-02, Real-Time Monitoring and Analysis Capabilities, may address

this topic.

• Project 2009-02 has been on hold and was recently re-initiated.

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Key Findings - Gaps

• Infrastructure maintenance
• There are requirements for maintenance of relays and vegetation

management but there are no comparable maintenance requirements for

• ther types of transmission equipment (i.e., breakers, transformers, etc.).
• NERC State of Reliability 2013 key findings #5:
• AC Substation Equipment Failures are a Second Significant Contributor to

Disturbance Events and Automatic Transmission Outage Severity.

• A recent voluntary survey of 2012 transmission outages initiated by failed AC

substation equipment indicates:

• 29 percent of these outages involved circuit breaker failures,
• 16 percent were due to arrester failures and
• 15 percent were due to power transformer failures.
• Recommendation: Address the reliability issue.
• The IE team is not recommending that the way to address this is with a

mandatory standard.

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Process

• RISC discussion
• Request for research
• RISC determination of appropriate solution

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