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October 2017

Vol. 22, No. 42 Week of October 15, 2017

Railbelt standards making progress

Electric utilities have been developing common reliability standards, have agreed to move forward on enforcement across the system

Alan Bailey

Petroleum News

A committee that has been consolidating the reliability standards for the Alaska Railbelt electrical system completed this project on Oct. 10 and the new standards are being reviewed for adoption, Brian Hickey from Chugach Electric Association told the Regulatory Commission of Alaska on Oct. 11. And the utilities have begun initiatives that will lead to enforcement of the standards across the Railbelt, electric utility executives told the commission. Currently there are two sets of standards covering different sections of the grid and the standards are not enforced.

Reliability standards set the bar for ensuring that electricity is generated and delivered where it is needed without interruption.

The Oct. 11 RCA meeting came as part of a commission effort to encourage voluntary unification of the Railbelt transmission grid, an effort that resulted from a commission opinion issued in 2015 that unification of the grid should proceed. The transmission grid supports six independent utilities operating in the region. Currently ownership and operation of the grid, a consequence of the manner in which the electrical power system has evolved, is divided between the utilities. The state of Alaska owns a section of the transmission intertie between the Southcentral and Fairbanks regions.

As well as dealing with the reliability standards, the utilities, with encouragement from the RCA, are moving towards the pooled operation of generation and transmission assets, the formation of a single company to operate the transmission system, and a system operator to oversee the system.

Consolidating the standards

The Intertie Management Committee, the group of utilities that manages the state transmission intertie between Southcentral Alaska and Golden Valley Electric Association’s Fairbanks based system, adopted a set of reliability standards in 2013. At that time Homer Electric Association, which is not a member of the IMC, established its own set of standards, Hickey explained. Since that time, the IMC has been working on merging those standards, an exercise that has just been completed, he said. At this point HEA is reviewing the new standards, with a view to adopting them - although not part of the IMC, representatives from HEA were involved in the standards consolidation process.

Ed Jenkin, senior system engineer for Matanuska Electric Association, told the commission that the focus is now moving to the enforcement of the standards. In the long term, the intent is to form a single organization such as a regional reliability council to ensure enforcement across the Railbelt. But, given that the intricacies of forming such an organization will likely require longer to deal with than is desirable for bringing standards enforcement into effect, the utilities have in the meantime developed a memorandum of understanding for the enforcement.

The utilities have also issued a request for proposal, seeking a qualified facilitator to help the utilities sort out the functions and governance of the reliability organization. It is anticipated that the organization will ultimately take on a broader role, including the oversight of integrated planning across the region, the oversight of unified requirements for connection to the grid, and the involvement of appropriate stakeholders in the transmission grid oversight, Jenkin said.

Enforcement within a year

Tony Izzo, CEO and general manager of MEA, commented that the Railbelt electrical system is currently undergoing a major transformation. The MOU that the utilities have now agreed to states that all of the utilities want to adopt one set of regional reliability standards, with enforcement provisions, and that the utilities will expedite the adoption of the standards, working diligently to adopt enforcement provisions within one year. The facilitator that is being sought will help move this process forward. And the RFP issued to seek the facilitator indicates the likely stakeholders in the process, in particular the utilities and the RCA, as well as organizations such as the Renewable Energy Alaska Project, the Alaska Energy Authority, and the Building Owners and Managers Association.

The MOU also states that the utilities will develop procedural rules and guidelines for reliability standards enforcement, including the formation of a technical committee to review the standards, and an enforcement committee to review violations and penalties, Izzo said. And, whereas HEA and Seward Electric Association are not members of the IMC, the Railbelt is transitioning to an arrangement in which all the utilities are fully involved, he commented.

New features and concerns

Hickey said that the consolidated reliability standards that have now been developed include some new features, including obligations for the provision of spinning reserves.

Another major issue is security: both physical security and cyber security. An effort is underway to develop standards to address these concerns.

Hickey said that the utilities have been undergoing cyber security evaluations by an industry control systems group, and that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Department of Homeland Security performed security reviews of the utilities’ computer systems. Senior staff and some technical staff are also going through top secret security clearance, to enable access to information about known threats, Hickey said.

There is still an unresolved issue of how to enable confidentiality around security discussions between the RCA and the utilities, given laws regarding public access to RCA information.

To assess its ability to deal with a computer system outage, in September Chugach Electric conducted a test, operating its load balancing area manually, without using its computer system to control what was happening, Hickey said.






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