RC West – Reliability Coordinator for much of the West
The California ISO wears several hats in the electrical power industry - market operator, reliability coordinator, and balancing authority. In this blog, I wanted to talk about the role of the NERC Reliability Coordinator (RC) that the California ISO performs as RC West. It’s a role I’m not sure many people outside the electricity industry and related government agencies know we play.
The role of a reliability coordinator requirement for each region of the country is something that the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), a non-profit regulatory authority, created to help ensure the effective and efficient reduction of risks to the reliability and security of the grid.
RC West is responsible for a large geographic area stretching from the Canadian border all the way to northern Mexico and it is the only United States reliability coordinator responsible for areas outside of our nation’s borders. We take pride in knowing that many balancing authorities over such a large geographic footprint trust us to serve as their reliability coordinator.
One crucial aspect of our work that I want to stress is that, in everything we do, we make sure our policies and actions treat each of the balancing authorities we work with equally, without bias or favor for anyone. That level of integrity and even-handedness is part of our brand. There is no deviation from it. Our customers know this is something they can always depend on.
In everything we do, we make sure our policies and actions treat each of the balancing authorities we work with equally, without bias or favor for anyone.
RC West has its own dedicated space in our operation centers and serves as the reliability coordinator of record for 42 balancing authorities and transmission operators in the Western United States.
As such, the 22 highly trained reliability coordinator operators oversee compliance with federal and regional grid standards for RC West customers. A key part of our job is determining measures to prevent or mitigate system emergencies in day-ahead or real-time operations across a wide footprint.
Our operators are trained to watch a multitude of issues in real time. They monitor energy flows on the system and run contingency analyses on system operations. They can see in real time if there is a current or potential issue anywhere in the Western Interconnection and they will work with the affected entities to develop and implement mitigation plans.
It’s one of those jobs where you can’t ever let your guard down. Operators have to be focused and thinking about a lot of different aspects of the grid at once, including our role in providing interconnection wide co-ordination during system restorations should there be a major grid event.
As reliability coordinators, we have the authority to order a balancing authority to shed load, which would be done by deploying rotating power outages to keep a system balanced. But working with the balancing authorities, we do everything we can to avoid power disruptions.
Even on quiet days, we are always busy but rarely more than during summer, when we face extreme weather events and the ever-present threat from wildfires.
At RC West, we are constantly monitoring wildfires in our geographical area, pulling in data from a wide variety of sources. If an operator sees a fire somewhere, he or she will analyze that threat and measure the fire’s distance from transmission lines. Our team will consider wind direction and speed and where the fire is heading. We can see what many of the firefighting agencies are doing to mitigate a fire and whether there are aircraft involved in fighting it.
Even on quiet days, we are always busy but rarely more than during summer, when we face extreme weather events and the ever-present threat from wildfires.
We reach out to transmission operators when a line appears to be in jeopardy and find out whether the fire is a threat. If it is, we analyze as quickly as we can what that can mean to the rest of the system.
We have an outstanding team at RC West and constructive relationships with the participating transmission owners and balancing authorities. I am particularly proud of the fact that we have a proven record of being innovative and proactive. We continue to develop tools that improve situational awareness for reliability coordinators in real time. A couple of examples are state-of-the art wildfire monitoring, oscillation detection, frequency response monitoring and power phase angle monitoring and an emergency notification system that alerts the Transmission Operators, Balancing Authorities and adjacent Reliability Coordinators to energy emergencies.
It’s not an easy job but I genuinely love it. It’s satisfying to know we’re making a difference and helping to oversee the grid and maintain reliability for millions of people. When there’s a problem, we work with our partner balancing authorities and Transmission Operators to fix it as cooperatively and efficiently as possible.
