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A Strong ERO
Our industry faces significant work to implement the changes—at the North American Electric Reliability Council, at the regional reliability councils, and at our own companies to maintain compliance. The establishment of a mandatory reliability regime was the number-one recommendation of the U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force following the August 14, 2003, blackout. However, the blackout was not the trigger for the creation of the Electric Reliability Organization (ERO), nor the reason for establishing reliability standards that are enforceable under penalties.
The cascading blackout that affected an estimated 50 million people and 61,800 megawatts of load in the Midwest, Northeast, and Ontario was but another reminder that the electricity industry’s transition to wholesale competition and open transmission access called for radical changes in means to assure the maintenance of power grid reliability.
We have known this for years.
“The old institutions for reliability are no longer sufficient,” said the 1998 final report of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board Task Force on Electric System Reliability that was formed in response to the West Coast blackouts in the summer of 1996. “We are already in the middle of our journey toward a restructured electricity industry. However, the new policies and institutions needed to assure electric reliability are not yet in place.”And the Department of Energy (DOE) task force made a chillingly accurate prediction in 1998: “Until such policies and institutions are in place, substantial parts of North America will be exposed to unacceptable risk.”
Read the entire article .
Also see video interview with José M. Delgado.
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