On October 1-2, 2024, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) held its second annual BES Protection System Misoperation Reduction Workshop at the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah. Building on the success of last year, this year’s event included presentations on the leading causes of protection system misoperations and mitigating actions taken by utilities. A particular focus was on the role of human performance in protection system misoperations, with examples of how entities are implementing and modifying processes to minimize human error. Highlights from the workshop include:
- NERC Overview: Provided insights into misoperation trends observed from data gathered through the Misoperation Information Data Analysis System (also known as MIDAS) and the Event Analysis Program. Incorrect settings continue to be the leading cause of misoperations across North America.
- Bonneville Power Administration: Presented the successes of their Transmission Continuous Improvement Program implementation, designed to identify a centralized process for reliability event analysis, lessons learned, and corrective action plans within their transmission organization.
- Quanta Technology and the IEEE PES Power System Relaying and Control Committee Working Group D45: Gave a presentation on wildfire risk and mitigation strategies for transmission and distribution systems.
- Xcel Energy: Addressed under-frequency load shed program challenges and solutions in low-inertia systems.
The event provided industry representatives the opportunity to share information on efforts to continuously improve system protection performance and strengthen reliability, as well as allowed ERO Enterprise (NERC and the Regional Entities collectively) staff to interact and enhance industry partnerships.
Following the workshop, members of MRO’s Protective Relay Subgroup (PRS) and staff had the opportunity to meet with WECC’s Protection and Control Subcommittee. This was a milestone for the PRS, marking the first time the group held a meeting with another region’s system protection subject matter experts. The joint meeting provided members from both groups an opportunity to share ideas, collaborate, and offer different perspectives on system protection challenges. Topics discussed included responsibilities during commission testing, efforts to reduce misoperations with unknown causes, impacts of inverter-based resources on system protection, and automated relay setting methods.
Meeting materials from this year’s BES Protection System Misoperation Reduction Workshop can be found here. If you are interested in getting involved with the PRS, more information, including upcoming meeting dates, can be found here.
It is not too early to start thinking about next year’s misoperation workshop, tentatively scheduled for October 7-8, 2025, which MRO will host in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Agenda and presentation recommendations or misoperation reduction success stories can be provided to Jake Bernhagen at [email protected].
– Jake Bernhagen, MRO Manager of Reliability Performance