The stepped up efforts by the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) to shore up electric reliability in the U.S. in the wake of last summer’s devastating blackout in the U.S. and Canada could very well “backslide” without the eventual passage of federal legislation that makes currently voluntary reliability standards mandatory and fleshes out the role of federal regulators in the oversight of the grid, the CEO of NERC told reporters last Thursday.

Slimmed down energy legislation pending on Capitol Hill calls for, among other things, mandatory electric reliability rules and the certification of an electric reliability organization by FERC. But the odds for such legislation clearing the necessary legislative hurdles and landing on the President’s desk in an election year remain dicey at best.

“Right now, we’re quite comfortable with the way FERC is backing us up, even though we appreciate that they don’t have jurisdiction over a significant part of the industry,” NERC CEO Michehl Gent said. “We think that having the buy in from the CEOs of all the different parts of the industry is going to carry us for a substantial number of months, possibly years, but eventually we’re going to have to have legislation or this will backslide, in my opinion.”

As a follow up, a reporter asked Gent how there could be the possibility of a lapse on the part of the power industry when it comes to reliability efforts. “I’ll answer a question with a question,” Gent responded. “Do you think we’re as concerned about terrorism as we were the day after 9-11? It’s just the further you get away from the event, the less attention it gets.”

NERC’s board of trustees earlier this month approved a set of reliability-related recommendations crafted in the wake of the Aug. 14, 2003 blackout.

Under the recommendations, NERC is initiating control area and reliability coordinator reliability readiness audits. Two FERC experts will accompany every NERC reliability readiness audit, 20 of which are scheduled to be performed across the country by June 30. In the interim, FERC has said that it will continue to explore its existing authority to oversee power grid reliability, while evaluating NERC’s stepped-up reliability efforts.

“PJM was audited last week, MISO [Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator] is in the process this week,” said David Hilt, NERC’s vice president for compliance. Hilt also confirmed that FERC staff members participating in the audits have signed agreements of non-disclosure related to the audits.

FERC is also establishing a new 30-person reliability division within the Office of Markets Tariffs and Rates, which will be staffed with grid reliability engineering experts, to provide support to NERC’s efforts and assure sound integration of reliability and market considerations in Commission decision making. Congress earmarked a $5 million in FERC’s current budget cycle for grid reliability oversight, and the President’s recent budget request to Congress seeks a similar funding level for fiscal year 2005.

Meanwhile, Gent and other NERC executives on Thursday were asked to comment as to why there appears to be so much secrecy surrounding reliability violations in the power sector. “The way the system is set up today is that each region conducts its own compliance program and some are based on contracts, some are based on voluntary compliance,” Gent said.

“We’ve put a team of people together to come up with the best ideas we can on how to fully disclose this and this will include members of the FERC staff,” he said. “If we get too far down the road on this, we’re worried about some of the commercial implications and we’re worried about the national security implications, but on the other hand, we fully are determined to be transparent as possible.”

Gent noted at a later point that “all the audits are going to be made public in some way. Today, only audits of reliability coordinators are made public. You will be able to see the audits of the 144 control areas. Specifically how much is going to be disclosed in those audits has yet to be determined, but certainly any abnormalities or violations of criteria or standards will be disclosed.”

Meanwhile, earlier in the week, James Torgerson, MISO’s CEO, said that he thinks the Aug. 14, 2003 blackout could have been contained if MISO had in place on Aug. 13 of last year various reliability related tools that the electric grid operator has since installed in the wake of the historic outage.

At a press briefing with reporters in Carmel, IN, Torgerson was asked whether various reliability tools, such as the recently installed “state estimator,” could have prevented the blackout from spreading beyond the problems that occurred in Ohio-based FirstEnergy’s territory on that fateful day last summer.

“I actually think yes,” the MISO CEO responded. “I think we would have prevented it. I can’t guarantee that, but we have much more information today than we did on Aug. 14,” he said. “Having the ability to see all that — then the key would be giving directives to the control area….if they needed to shed load,” for example. “We would have the information today that we didn’t have Aug. 14 to do that. I think the possibility would be much higher that it could have been reduced or prevented.”

Torgerson was joined by FERC Chairman Patrick Wood at a briefing related to the Midwest grid operator’s reliability enhancement efforts.

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