Pandemic Cause Code Effective April 29, 2020

Effective April 29, 2020, NERC has added cause code 9015 – Pandemic for reporting events that are affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is an OMC cause code listed within the External: Catastrophes table and applies to all unit types.

Because the COVID-19 pandemic is classified as an OMC catastrophe, it falls under the definition of “unexpected problems or conditions”. It is not part of the scope of an outage and cannot be used as the reason for an extension. Therefore, you must add a forced event to account for pandemic effects instead of an extension of the original event.

For more details from the NERC GADS website by clicking on this link:  Addendum 1 - Pandemic Cause Codes

To download your GADS OS updated cause code database, click on this link: Cause Code Updater

Using method “3. Download” on the page, you can now download the CauseCodesen-US.mdb file (it’s in CauseCodesen-US.zip).

This will simply require that you download the mdb file into the GADSOSCCUpdater folder and then run the Cause Code Updater application … no software installation required.

IMPORTANT: In Window 7 and above, using Windows Explorer browse to the location the downloaded ZIP file was saved to, right-click on the file, bring up its properties, and "Unblock" the file ... then press "Apply".  Then you can unzip the mdb file.