Related Files
Status
Final ballots for IRO-002-5 - Reliability Coordination - Monitoring and Analysis and TOP-001-4 - Transmission Operations concluded 8 p.m. Eastern, Monday, December 12, 2016. The voting results can be accessed via the links below. The standards will be submitted to the Board of Trustees for adoption and then filed with the appropriate regulatory authorities.
Background
On November 19, 2015, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (Commission) issued Order No. 817 approving nine TOP and IRO standards from Project 2014-03 and retiring or superseding 18 currently-enforceable standards. The proposed standards were developed in Project 2014-03 to address Commission concerns and reliability issues identified in the 2011 Southwest Outage Report, the Independent Experts Review Panel project, and stakeholder technical conferences. In approving the new TOP and IRO standards, the Commission issued three directives to modify the TOP and IRO standards to address additional reliability issues.
Standard(s) Affected – The Standard Drafting Team (SDT) will develop modifications to TOP-001-3 - Transmission Operations and IRO-002-4 - Reliability Coordination: Monitoring and Analysis to address Order No. 817 directives, or develop an equally efficient and effective alternative.
Purpose/Industry Need
The modifications to TOP and IRO standards developed in this project will address the following reliability concerns identified in Order No. 817:
· Monitoring non-Bulk Electric System facilities. The Commission noted that "in some instances the absence of real-time monitoring of non-BES facilities by the transmission operator within and outside its TOP area as necessary for determining SOL exceedances in proposed TOP-001-3, Requirement R10 creates a reliability gap." (P.35)
· Redundancy and Diverse Routing of Data Exchange Capabilities. The Commission determined that, with respect to data exchange capabilities, the TOP and IRO standards requirements for Reliability Coordinators (RCs), Transmission Operators (TOPs), and Balancing Authorities (BAs) "do not clearly address redundancy and diverse routing so that registered entities will unambiguously recognize that they have an obligation to address redundancy and diverse routing as part of their TOP and IRO compliance obligations." (P. 47)
· Testing of the Alternate or Less Frequently Used Data Exchange Capability. The Commission determined that existing requirements do not establish a clear obligation for RCs, TOPs, and BAs to test alternative data exchange capabilities (P. 51).
Per Order No. 817, revised Reliability Standards addressing these issues must be filed for approval by July 2017.
