In the aftermath of the devastating August blackout that hit parts of Canada and the United States, top grid operator officials last week said that reliability coordinators must be able to order actions in real-time during emergency conditions and that this authority has to be clearly defined before problems crop up on the power grid.

“It has to be spelled out well beforehand,” said Mike Calimano, an official with the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO), in an appearance before a technical conference in Philadelphia. The conference was sponsored by the electric systems investigation team supporting a joint U.S.-Canada task force examining the blackout.

“You can’t get into a discussion at the time” of an emergency condition on the power grid, Calimano went on to say. “And, it can’t be a request. It’s an order.” Calimano said that “Clearly, in the real-time situation, action has to be taken [and] has to be spelled out.” The NYISO official said that “this has to be worked out well before the emergency. People have to understand who’s in charge and when and what actions they can do and can’t do.”

Similarly, PJM Interconnection’s Mike Kormos said that who has what authority and when during a power-related emergency “needs to be clear up front. The actions that can be taken. The actions that will be taken. What the procedures are. Who has the authority to take it. Again, I think that needs to be absolutely clear cut in the minds of all.”

As reliability coordinators, “we need to go back to the basics,” Kormos said. “We need to go back to looking at really what I believe were some fundamental system operations basics regarding system monitoring,” he added. “I really think we need to take a step back and really look at what we’re doing and how we’re doing them and the tools we’re using to do that.”

Meanwhile, the Western Area Power Administration’s (WAPA) Mark Fidrych said that “there needs to be a greater sharing of accurate data among all companies and that extends to planning and outage data that’s used to develop contingency analysis.”

The WAPA official also said that there needs to be exchange programs among the reliability coordinators, “i.e., working visits to the neighboring areas — the neighboring reliability coordinators — to promote the personal relationships, as well as to the subordinate control areas, on an ongoing basis.”

Fidrych said that the power industry needs “to develop a greater standardization to our methods and our reviews. We have to broaden the visibility to what is happening on the system…and that includes all system parameters including generation.”

Linda Campbell, representing the Florida Reliability Coordinating Council (FRCC), said that reliability plans should have a common format. “This would help reduce inconsistencies between the different reliability coordinator operations. That doesn’t necessarily mean that every reliability plan will look the same and be a cookie cutter, but at least every reliability plan should follow some sort of a checklist so that they’ve asked themselves the same questions and then they can take the appropriate actions,” as necessary.

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