Vegetation Management Compliance

Texas Reliability Entity, Inc. (Texas RE) reports to the North American Reliability Corporation (NERC) the compliance of Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) transmission owners (TOs) with NERC standard FAC-003-1, Transmission Vegetation Management Program.

TOs are responsible for vegetation management on 345 kV lines and other voltage lines deemed significant to reliability of the transmission grid. A vegetation management program must include inspection requirements, trimming clearances, and an annual work plan.

TOs send outage reports to Texas RE each quarter. TOs also must self-certify each year that they performed vegetation maintenance according to the vegetation management program requirements.

There are a few exceptions to reporting vegetation management outages:

• Multiple outages on an individual line, if caused by the same vegetation, are reported as one outage regardless of the actual number of outages within a 24-hour period.
• A single trip followed by a successful automatic re-close within a 24-hour period is not a reportable outage.
• Vegetation contacts due to natural disasters or storm-related (earthquake, fire, tornados, hurricanes, wind shear [micro-bursts] ice storms, hail storms, and floods) are not considered vegetation-related.

Please refer to NERC Reliability Standard FAC-003-1 for details of the requirements.

Texas RE conducts spot-checks on TOs to check plan initiation, progress, site inspections, and other details.