Myths, Legends and Reliability Standards
The notion of “reliability to the nines” — that electric utility service should be so reliable as to suffer an outage event on only one day in ten years — stands as a touchstone of today’s electric utility industry. Yet it’s no more than myth, a sort of urban legend that likely sprouted wings back in the 1960s, after the first big New York City blackout, when the industry told Congress it could regulate itself by setting up voluntary reliability standards. In truth, there is not now nor never has been a formal, nationwide electric reliability standard to require utilities to maintain a loss of load expectation (LOLE) no greater than 0.1 per year. It’s a canard, a chimera.
That fact was made abundantly clear at the close of last year when, at long last, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) finally got around to filing a formal application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for approval of the proposed Regional Reliability Standard BAL-502-RFC-02 — Planning Resource Adequacy Analysis, Assessment and Documentation, to give the ”one day in ten years” standard the force of law – but only in the particular region known as Reliability First, which covers a wide swath of the mid-Atlantic and near Midwest, blanketing PJM and covering a substantial chunk of the Midwest ISO.
Posted: March 30th, 2010 under Capacity Markets, Capacity Price, Cost of New Entry, Electric Utility Regulation, Energy Markets, Loss of Load Expectation, Loss of Load Probability, NERC, RTOs, Reliability, Reliability Standards, Reserve Margin, Resource Adequacy.
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