How to Achieve Compliance for NERC Reliability Standards PRC-005-6 and TPL-001-5

This standard covers all aspects of the maintenance of the protection circuits within the BES, including the DC plant that powers these circuits. It requires eligible utilities to perform proactive maintenance, monitoring, and reporting to ensure their DC systems are adequately prepared in the event of a potential power outage. By monitoring, reporting, and alarming on a set of defined parameters on a 24/7 basis, utilities will maintain NERC PRC-005-6 compliance and ensure reliability.

See how our VIGILANT battery monitoring system delivers NERC PRC-005-6 compliance by measuring a series of parameters, providing trending data, and offering one-click reporting.

As a planning standard, NERC TPL-001 requires systems be designed by identifying single points of failure and implementing a corrective plan of action to create redundancy. The -5 edition of the standard specifically identifies the single charger/single battery configuration in substations as a single point of failure. It calls for each substation to have two battery systems operating in parallel. 

However, at the majority of existing substations, since there is no room to add a second DC system for redundancy, the standard allows these systems to be grandfathered in if they follow a couple additional steps. As long as these systems are monitored and alarms are in place to:

1. Identify a problem with the DC voltage or that the battery has become open circuit
2. It will be reported to the network operations center on a 7/24 basis

Eagle Eye Power Solutions BC-2500™ has the unique capability of being able to provide a definitive test of battery continuity and the status of the DC voltage on a daily basis without human intervention.