NERC

NERC Announces New Reliability Assurance Senior Director - September 12 - NERC announced that Andrea Koch will become  Senior Director for Reliability Assurance, effective September 19.  Currently, Koch serves as the Senior Director of ERO Enterprise Operations and Strategic Planning.  In her new role, Koch will be responsible for monitoring and oversight of the Regions and core operational activities associated with risk-based compliance and reliability assurance.

NERC to Present AC Circuit Outage Paper - September 8 - NERC staff prepared a technical paper, entitled “"North American AC Circuit Outages Initiated by Transmission Equipment Failures and Human Error,” which presents a statistical analysis of forced AC outages initiated by equipment failure and human error.  The paper will be presented at IEEE Power Engineering Society's Transmission and Distribution Latin America 2016 conference in Morelia, Mexico, on September 22.

NERC Petition for Approval of Proposed Reliability Standards PRC-027-1 and PER-006-1 and Retirement of PRC-001-1.1(ii) - September 2 – NERC filed a petition with FERC seeking approval of proposed Reliability Standards PRC-027-1, Coordination of Protection Systems for Performance During Faults, and PER-006-1, Specific Training for Personnel, and proposing to retire PRC-001-1.1(ii).   The purpose of the proposed Reliability Standards is to: (1) maintain the coordination of Protection Systems installed to detect and isolate Faults on Bulk Electric System (BES) Elements, such that those Protection Systems operate in the intended sequence during Faults; and (2) require registered entities to provide training to their relevant personnel on Protection Systems and Remedial Action Schemes to help ensure that the BES is reliably operated. NERC proposed the retirement of the six requirements that make up PRC-001-1.1(ii) because the two proposed standards will replace it.

Other Developments

DOE Announcements $1.8 Million Investment in New Research to Address Risk and Uncertainty in the Grid - August 25 - As a part of continued efforts to increase the reliability and resilience of the power grid through its Grid Modernization Initiative, the DOE’s Office of Electric Delivery and Energy Reliability announced nearly $1.8 million in research awards. The research will be conducted at academic institutions in California, Iowa, New York and Texas and will focus on wholesale market operations, transmission system design, and demand-side participation.