The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) is a nonprofit corporation based in Atlanta, Georgia, and formed on March 28, 2006, as the successor to the North American Electric Reliability Council (also known as NERC). The original NERC was formed on June 1, 1968, by the electric utility industry to promote the reliability and adequacy of bulk power transmission in the electric utility systems of North America. NERC's mission states that it is to "ensure the reliability of the North American bulk power system."NERC oversees six regional reliability entities and encompasses all of the interconnected power systems of Canada and the contiguous United States, as well as a portion of the Mexican state of Baja California.NERC's major responsibilities include working with all stakeholders to develop standards for power system operation, monitoring and enforcing compliance with those standards, assessing resource adequacy, and providing educational and training resources as part of an accreditation program to ensure power system operators remain qualified and proficient. NERC also investigates and analyzes the causes of significant power system disturbances in order to help prevent future events.Sustained outages in the U.S. went from less than 12 in 2000 to over 180 in 2020. The average utility customer went from 8 hours of power failure per year in 2013 to 16 in 2020.S.S.
Transmission utilities routinely collect detailed outage data, including resilience events in which outages bunch due to weather. The resilience events and associated metrics can readily be extracted from this historical outage data. Improvements such as asset hardening or investments in restoration lead to reduced outages or faster restoration. In this paper, we show how to rerun the historical events including the effects of the reduced outages or faster restorations to measure the resulting improvement in resilience metrics, thus quantifying the benefits of these investments. This is demonstrated with case studies for specific events (a derecho and a hurricane), and all large events or large thunderstorms in the Midwest USA. Instead of predicting future extreme events with models, which is very challenging, rerunning historical events readily quantifies the benefits of resilience investments if these investments had been made in the past. Rerunning historical events is particularly vivid in making the case for resilience investments as it quantifies the benefits for events actually experienced, rather than for uncertain future events.
AbstractAn announcement of the passing of Editor of Space Weather, Jennifer Gannon.
This paper develops a method for computing probabilities of contingencies P1-P7 specified by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) Standard TPL-001-4. These probabilities are useful for performing industry-based probabilistic planning power flow studies. Markov models are provided that characterize TPL contingency types P1-P7, and data processing necessary to estimate model parameters is described based on NERC data collection systems GADS, GADS-Wind, TADS, and MIDAS. A software system called Contingency Probability Estimation Tool (CPET) is described that encapsulates these models, processes, and data.
•Gas shortages at New England generators have accounted for up to ¼ of all failures.•A $3−7/MWh premium could mitigate ∼2 GW of gas shortages using oil dual fuel.•A $7−16/MWh premium could mitigate ∼2 GW of gas shortages using CNG storage.•Battery costs must decrease by 75 % to be competitive with fuel storage for mitigating gas shortages.
