Status:
Approved by FERC in an Order Issued on March 21, 2013.
Purpose/Industry Need:
FAC-003-1 was approved in 2006. It has some ‘fill-in-the-blank’ components to eliminate. In addition, the following comments submitted by FERC and stakeholders need to be addressed in the refinement of the standard:
FERC Order 693 items
Address the issue regarding applicability:
- Work with the reliability entities and the ERO to collect and make available to the FERC, a list of critical lower voltage transmission lines. (Refer to Applicability 4.3 section of the standard.)
- Consider other criteria in determining applicability of the standard to sub 200kV lines.
- Address the issue of clearances for lines on both federal and non-federal lands:
- Review and analyze outage data (collected by the ERO) then consider defining clearances needed to avoid sustained vegetation-related outages that would apply to transmission lines crossing both federal and non-federal land.
- Consider revising the definition of right of way to encompass required clearance areas.
- Review the suitability of IEEE 516-2003 standard for minimum vegetation clearance.
- Review and analyze outage data (collected by the ERO) then consider defining clearances needed to avoid sustained vegetation-related outages that would apply to transmission lines crossing both federal and non-federal land.
- Consider revising the definition of right of way to encompass required clearance areas.
- Review the suitability of IEEE 516-2003 standard for minimum vegetation clearance.
Procedural items
- Re-format standard to bring it into conformance with the latest version of the Reliability Standard Development Procedure and the ERO Sanctions Guidelines.
- Remove references to RRO in the standard and substitute a responsible entity.
- Add newly developed compliance elements such as time horizons, violation risk factors, violation severity levels, etc.
Stakeholder items
- Prepare technical reference material such as a “white paper” to aid in understanding the technical basis for the standard.
- Review reporting criteria for Category 3 outages in the proposed technical reference material and may remove the reporting requirement of Category 3 outages in R.3 and R.4.
- Consider deleting requirement R.4.
- Review the reporting exemptions to include all category outages under major disasters in Requirement R3.2.
The development may include other improvements to the standards deemed appropriate by the drafting team, with the consensus of stakeholders, consistent with establishing high quality, enforceable and technically sufficient bulk power system reliability standards.
