Mark Lauby

Presentations:

Creating Industry Driven Reliability Standards

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) is an international regulatory authority. Its mission is to “keep lights on” for nearly 400 million people across continental United States, Canada, and the northern portion of Baja California, Mexico. This tutorial highlights the tools NERC uses to assure the effective and efficient reduction of risks to the reliability and security of the grid. The primary tool is development and enforcement of Reliability Standards. These Standards written, and agreed upon, by industry experts define the expectations of organizations to support reliable operations as part of their day-to-day activities. This tutorial covers Standards development process and specific niareas listed below:

• Reliability Coordination
• Real-time Operations
• Transmission Planning
• Transmission Operations
• Generation Operations
• System Protection and Maintenance
• Training
• Infrastructure Protection
• Emergency Operations and System Restoration

Seasonal and Long-Term Reliability Assessments

Each year, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) independently assesses and reports on the overall reliability, adequacy, and associated risks that could impact the upcoming summer and winter peak demand seasons as well as the long-term, 10-year period. This lecture presents how NERC projects electricity supply and demand, evaluate transmission system adequacy, and discuss key issues and trends that could affect reliability in the United States and Canada. In addition, special assessments conducted on a regional, interregional, or interconnection-wide basis will be highlighted along with methods and assumptions. By identifying and quantifying emerging reliability issues, NERC is able to provide risk-informed recommendations and support a learning environment for industry to pursue improved reliability performance. These recommendations, along with the associated technical analysis, provide the basis for actionable enhancements to resource and transmission planning methods, planning and operating guidelines, and NERC Reliability Standards.

Inverter-Based Resource Disturbance Events

Besides development and enforcement of Reliability Standards, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) analyzes off-normal system disturbance events, including widespread reduction of inverter-based resources, to identify systemic reliability issues, support affected facility owners, and share key findings and recommendations with industry for increased awareness and action. This lecture presents multiple recent disturbances that involve the widespread reduction of solar photovoltaic (PV) resources have occurred in California, Utah, and Texas, particularly two widespread losses of battery energy storage systems (BESS) caused by normally cleared faults in the Western Interconnection that occurred on March 9, 2022, and April 6, 2022. These events are unique in that they are the first major events involving BESS facilities. These events highlight the need to consider BESS in the same light as any other inverter-based resource, such as solar PV for their systemic reliability risks. This presentation will also highlight processes of data collection and event analysis. The developed lessons learned and corrective actions are shared with industry to prevent recurrence. Alerts are issued to industry when emerging risk patterns are identified and used for Standards revision if warranted.

Renewable Energy Powering the Grid

Abstract: The reliability and resilience of the transforming resource mix is more vulnerable to extreme, widespread, and long-duration temperatures shifts. For example, there is an increasing reliance on just-in-time delivery of natural gas, wind, and solar to fuel new generating capacity. During extreme, widespread, and long-duration temperatures shifts, many of these resources may become unavailable, while at the same time, the ability of transfers to make up the energy deficit is limited. Operations planning and communications with natural gas suppliers and pipelines is becoming increasingly important for the reliable and resilient operation of the bulk power system. Capacity used to assure the availability of energy and essential reliability services. With the integration of renewable resources, we will need to both manage the uncertainty from the variable resources and engineer the integration of renewables right. This requires enough energy and to ensure that sufficient amounts of essential reliability services are available to maintain the reliable and resilient operation of the bulk power system. In this presentation we will address how this will be accomplished. We can address this by: Adding No/Low Carbon Resources Ensure sufficient amount of no/low carbon energy is built and available to meet decarbonization goals. Build Transmission Develop adequate transmission to integrate renewables and transmit and distribute energy from areas that are rich in energy, to areas that are poor. Providing Balancing Resources Maintain a robust fleet of balancing resources needed to serve energy along with integrated renewables. Energy Supply Chain Ensure healthy energy supply chains for balancing resources, with sufficient access to stored energy to withstand long0duration, widespread extreme weather events. All this needs to be done as we meet the increased demands of electrification, and large loads such as data centers, AI computing and crypto-currency centers.