Idaho Power Company (IPCO), Docket No. RC13-1 (October 31, 2012)
Reliability Standard: BAL-004-WECC-01
Requirement: 2
Region: WECC
Issue: While conducting a compliance audit, WECC found that IPCO, in its role as a BA in the Western Interconnection, did notify other Balancing Authorities of Automatic Time Error Correction (ATEC) outages on seven occasions between November 30, 2009 and July 6, 2011 in accordance with BAL-004-WECC-01 R2. Enforcement determined that IPCO was required to issue notice to other Balancing Authorities per BAL-004-WECC-01 R2 on each occasion. Enforcement, therefore, determined that IPCO had an issue with BAL-004-WECC-01 between November 30, 2009, and July 6, 2011.
Finding: The issue was deemed to pose minimal risk to BPS reliability ATEC outages were limited to seven instances of less than two hours duration. Long-term operation without ATEC in service coincident with large inadvertent energy accumulations may result in more frequent manual time error corrections. Balancing Authorities are not required to acknowledge that they are aware of the change in status or to take any actions in response.
