NEW: NERC has extended the Q1-Q3 GADS reporting deadlines to 12/19/2024!
Since 2024, NERC compliance reporting deadlines for GADS Q1–Q3 have been extended to December 19, 2024. This gives you more time to finalize your 2024 wind and conventional GADS data reporting and adapt to the new GADS solar data reporting requirements.
Here’s a quick history of GADS and a walkthrough of the Winds GADS reporting requirements.
What is NERC GADS and why is it important?
NERC has been gathering data on the North American bulk power system since 1968. The formation of NERC was a direct response to the massive 1965 North East blackout. Starting in 1982, the Generating Availability Data System (GADS) reporting became a mandatory part of that reporting. It’s a mandatory industry program for conventional generating units that are 20 megawatts (MW) and larger and is optionally open to all other generators. Currently, GADS maintains the complete operating history on over 90% of the installed generation capacity in the United States and Canada.
The data contained in the GADS reports is only that information required to determine reliability, availability, and maintainability (RAM). To that end, the IEEE standard 762 was defined to allow all operators to have standardized terms surrounding these metrics. These reports and metrics are published to allow other operators to review and learn from to avoid taking preventable outages. Regulators can also review the data to preemptively mitigate new problems as they arise. An example of this is the large shift that is currently happening toward renewable resources and batteries.
Wind GADS changes for 2024
Starting in 2017, wind plant personnel were able to start voluntarily reporting on all wind units. Between 2018 and 2020, NERC began to require Wind GADS reporting on plants with a total installed capacity larger than 200 MW and reduced the reporting requirements to all plants that have an installed capacity of larger than 75 MW.
In 2024, there were a few adjustments to the Wind GADS reporting. The most notable changes were the inclusion of the new Contributing Operating Condition, which is now included in all NERC reporting, and the change to bring the required reporting to be more in line with conventional GADS and the new Solar GADS specification.
Previously, there were five required files to submit to NERC for Wind GADS: plant, group, sub-group, component outage, and performance. This required that each wind operator track the turbines and report at three different levels, track all turbine events at the sub-group level, and then calculate the performance indies at that same level. These reports ended up being mostly redundant, as the group and plant level information was often just aggregated sub-group data. The plant, group, and sub-group reports also included the specific design information related to the units it included, so a majority of those files were static from period to period.
The 2024 reporting is only three files: configuration data, monthly performance data, and event data. The configuration data is mostly static, unless you are adding new wind capacity, and then it is a one-time add to the document. The performance and event files are very similar now to the conventional GADS reporting where all the data is reported at the subgroup level. There is a new change to the wind performance data reporting that differs from conventional GADS where energy storage located within the wind plant boundary is reported with the wind performance data.
Challenges in achieving NERC compliance for wind performance data
With the rapid rise in the number of renewable resources, the average wind farm has 50 turbines, which can represent several NERC GADS sub-groups. Once you have a couple of wind plants in your portfolio, you are looking at monitoring and reporting on quite a bit of data. For each month, you then must group, evaluate, and perform calculations on that data to generate the needed reporting for GADS. This real-time data is often at the minute level and generates over 1,400 data points per turbine per day.
The wind plants are often located in remote locations and so suffer from data quality and data integrity issues as well. Reviewing that much data quickly becomes an inhuman task. Also remember that this is a separate process from conventional GADS, which is uploaded through a completely different interface, which means that any conventional GADS solutions will not be able to assist in Wind GADS reporting.
Streamlining NERC compliance with automated GADS reporting
PCI Wind GADS automation is leading the charge into this new territory. Taking our long history of integrations with outage management solutions and conventional GADS automation, we have introduced new ways to simplify your FERC NERC compliance reporting.
PCI Wind GADS can seamlessly connect to renewable resource meters to both capture real-time wind derate events and update Wind GADS events. Using NERC compliance best practices as outlined in the DRI, PCI’s Wind GADS solution will automate the process of tracking and creating Wind GADS events and calculating the performance data with a few mouse clicks. The result is a set of files that just need to be uploaded to the NERC Wind GADS portal.
Built-in validations will alert users to potential data issues or unexpected calculations. All this automation allows GADS reporters to focus their time and effort on resolving issues instead of aligning meter data and events. Additionally, automation reduces the risk of human error when copying or truing up data.
Simplify your GADS reporting process with automation
Whether you’re new to Wind GADS reporting or if you’ve been submitting since the start in 2017, the changes in 2024 will impact your reporting process. With the amount of new wind turbines continuing to come online and with the large volume of data they generate, switching to a more automated Wind GADS reporting tool is becoming a requirement.
Stay ahead of regulatory requirements with our GADS Software. Automate data capture, streamline quarterly reports, and ensure compliance—so you can focus on optimizing plant performance.
