The electric and natural gas industries need to strengthen their winterization and cold weather preparedness and coordination to prevent a recurrence of the unprecedented February 2021 power outages to millions of people during the February 2021 freeze in Texas and the Midwest.

That is the assessment of a preliminary report presented at today’s Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) meeting by a joint inquiry team of staff from FERC and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) and its regional entities. The report reviews what happened during the freeze and outlines a series of recommendations, including mandatory electric reliability standards, to prevent its recurrence.

https://www.nerc.com/news/Headlines%20DL/2021%20Winter%20Freeze%20092321.pdf 

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.

If you are a smaller generating company (e.g., single plant site, municipal, etc) and currently run web-based GADS reporting software such as MicroGADS Gold, you might be doing so because you don't have an IT department to support installing software or running something like SQL Server or Oracle ... as a result you're running a vendor's software on their web servers.

If you need or want to switch to GADS Open Source, we have a solution for you.

Our software can also use the Microsoft Access that is a part of Microsoft Office, which you probably already use.

We can provide at no cost installation support and data migration to install everything needed on a desktop/laptop or shared drive ... everything runs in-house; no vendor costs.

Feel free to contact us at any time to explore how we can be of assistance.