FERC Chairman Pat Wood last Monday said that if Congress won’t mandate electric reliability standards the Commission may have to step forward with some standards of its own by next summer.

FERC has “had a general view in the past that our authority over reliability is not explicit in our statute; it may be time to rethink that,” Wood said at a FERC-sponsored reliability conference. He said “the bottom line is we need to have some [reliability] standards in place, hopefully by the summer.”

Under the comprehensive energy bill recently cast aside by Congress, FERC would have been given the responsibility of certifying an electric reliability organization.

Meanwhile, the quality of training for control room operators in the U.S. power industry and what role a lack of training played in the Aug. 14 blackout came under significant scrutiny at the FERC-sponsored conference last week.

The power industry is taking “a significantly different view” of the need for thorough training and the types of training being offered since the blackout, Alison Silverstein, a top FERC staff member, said at the conference.

She provided an overview of the findings of a recent interim report issued by a U.S.-Canadian task force examining the blackout. Among other things, the interim report found that FirstEnergy Corp. violated voluntary reliability standards set by the North American Electric Reliability Council.

“It was clear that the cause of FirstEnergy’s problems were because its operators did not have extensive training,” Silverstein said in response to a question from Joseph Kelliher, one of two new commissioners at FERC.

While noting that he was not trying to be “unduly critical” of FirstEnergy, Kelliher asked whether on-the-job training for control room operators is common or unusual in the power industry. “The investigative team has not looked at this in detail,” Silverstein responded. “The second phase of the report will look at technical recommendations, some policy recommendations, and something like operator training. I don’t expect it to go into a deep level of detail.”

Later in the week, Charles Jones, a top official with FirstEnergy, told an audience of investors that the utility is moving to establish a “zero tolerance” policy for tree-related power outages in the future and is working to establish improvements in training control room operators, a top official with the company said on Wednesday.

Among other things, the task force’s interim report concluded that FirstEnergy failed to adequately manage tree growth in its transmission rights of way. “This failure was the common cause of the outage of three FE [FirstEnergy] 345-kV transmission lines,” the report stated.

On Thursday, the task force kicked off the first of several public hearings in the U.S. and Canada as a follow up to the interim report. At the first hearing, held in Cleveland, the Ohio Consumers Counsel (OCC) said that the panel should recommend in its final report that mandatory standards exist for the regional coordination of transmission operations and that electric utilities be held accountable if they fail to meet reliability rules.

The OCC’s comments came on the same day that U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham told reporters in Washington, DC, that he would rather have Congress sign off on electric grid reliability rules for utilities, instead of FERC setting standards on a case-by-case basis. According to Reuters, Abraham is worried that the approach being considered by FERC could face challenges in the courts. “Hopefully, we won’t have to resort to potentially challengeable types of approaches,” Abraham was quoted as saying. Abraham left open the door of meeting with Wood to talk about the issue further, the wire service reported.

The second hearing held by the task force took place on Friday in New York City and the third hearing is slated for Dec. 8 in Toronto.

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