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FERC Proposes Stricter Standards to Mitigate Geomagnetic Disturbances on Grids

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) last week proposed to require new standards addressing the impacts of a geomagnetic disturbance (GMD), saying that, though it recognized the strong disturbances that result in distortions to Earth’s magnetic field are infrequent, current mandatory reliability standards do not adequately address vulnerabilities.

The agency issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NOPR) that proposes to direct the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) to develop and submit new GMD standards in a two-stage process. First, within 90 days of the effective date of a final rule, the rule will require that NERC should file one or more standards requiring owners and operators of the bulk power system to develop and implement operational procedures to mitigate GMD effects. Such procedures already are in place in some areas, and that should allow for faster development and implementation of these standards, the NOPR says.

In the second stage, FERC proposes that NERC should file, within six months of a final rule, standards that require grid owners and operators to conduct initial and continuing assessments of the potential impacts of GMDs. Based on those assessments, grid owners would then be required to implement strategies to protect the bulk power system. Measures would include automatic blocking of geomagnetically induced currents, instituting specification requirements for new equipment, inventory management, or isolating certain equipment that is not cost effective to retrofit. “Stage two would be implemented in phases, focusing first on the most critical and vulnerable assets,” FERC said in a statement last week.

“The NOPR does not propose specific requirements, but offers guidance regarding the assessments of the grid’s vulnerability to GMDs, the mechanisms for protecting critical or vulnerable components and an implementation schedule. FERC seeks comments on all aspects of the proposal,” it said.

"We take this action based on government-sponsored studies and NERC studies that conclude that GMD events can have an adverse, wide-area impact on the reliable operation of the Bulk-Power System,” FERC says in the NOPR. In a 2010 study prepared for the federal commission, the Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory reported that GMD events can “develop quickly over large geographic footprints, having the capability to produce geographically-large outages and significant damage to Bulk-Power System equipment.”

FERC said the severity of the risk posed by GMDs to the reliable operation of the bulk power system was also expressed at a technical conference held this April. “At the Technical Conference, panelists stated that the current 11-year solar activity cycle is expected to hit its maximum activity in 2013 and large solar events often occur within four years of such a cycle maximum,” it said.

Sources: POWERnews, FERC

—Sonal Patel, Senior Writer (@POWERmagazine)

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