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October 15, 2015
Subject: Retirement of PRC-002-NPCC-01 Disturbance Monitoring
At its February, 2015 meeting NPCC’s Regional Standards Committee (RSC) approved a RSAR for PRC-002-NPCC-01, the Purpose of the RSAR being:
“…to review the regional standard for potential revisions made necessary by the industry’s adoption of the new NERC BES definition, the Paragraph 81 directive, and the development of NERC’s PRC-002-2 Disturbance Monitoring and Reporting Requirements standard. Retiring PRC-002-NPCC-01 is to be considered if it is determined that it can be retired without sacrificing the ability to capture post-disturbance data.”
The Drafting Team was convened to address the RSAR. The Drafting Team reviewed PRC-002-NPCC-01 Disturbance Monitoring, against recently FERC approved (September 25, 2015) PRC-002-2 Disturbance Monitoring and Reporting Requirements, FERC approved PRC-018-1 Disturbance Monitoring Equipment Installation and Data Reporting (which is to be retired after the PRC-002-2 implementation period), and NPCC Criteria A-15 Disturbance Monitoring Equipment Criteria.
PRC-002-NPCC-01 addresses ensuring “that adequate disturbance data is available to facilitate Bulk Electric System event analyses”, and is intended to be applied to the NPCC defined Bulk Power System. PRC-002-NPCC-01 used Criteria A-15 as its foundation. PRC-002-2 is also focused on having “adequate data available to facilitate analysis of Bulk Electric System (BES) Disturbances”, but refers to the NERC defined BES. PRC-002-NPCC-01 however, is more stringent than PRC-002-2 in its requirements for sequence of events and fault recording, but less stringent than PRC-002-2 in its requirements for dynamic Disturbance recording. The Drafting Team decided that with the Disturbance Monitoring capability in place for sequence of events and fault recording from the implementation of PRC-002-NPCC-01 (implementation to be completed October 20, 2015) the data capture required by PRC-002-2 for the BES would be achieved. The Drafting Team agreed that the more stringent sequence of events and fault recording criteria in PRC-002-NPCC-1, which is applicable to all NPCC defined Bulk Power System facilities, could be addressedby the development of a new directory. This, along with PRC-002-2 being more stringent than PRC-002-NPCC-01 in its dynamic Disturbance recording requirements, lead the Drafting Team to recommend the retirement of PRC-002-NPCC-01, and the development of a new directory.
“NPCC Directories have been developed in order to provide a consistent and comprehensive set of reliability requirements for the Northeast, while consolidating related information for NPCC Criteria, Guidelines, Procedures, as well as FERC and NERC approved Regional Standards into one document.” With that in mind, the Drafting Team decided that PRC-002-NPCC-01 is no longer necessary, its more stringent parameters could be captured in a new NPCC directorywhich would replace A-15, and include the applicable NPCC Guideline and Procedure (“B” and “C”) documents as appendices. The development of a directory would ensure that any redundancies between NERC standards documents would be eliminated.
The retirement of PRC-002-NPCC-01 will not have an impact on the reliability of the Bulk Electric System. The implementations of PRC-002-2, PRC-002-NPCC-01 (prior to its retirement), and the new directory will ensure adequate Disturbance Monitoring data is captured for event analysis.