February 21, 2005—The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has supplemented its April 2004 policy statement on power system reliability by affirming that Good Utility Practice required under the commissions open-access transmission tariff includes compliance with new reliability standards adopted by the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC).
The commissions order came one day after the NERC Board of Trustees approved its Version 0 reliability standards, which are slated to take effect April 1, 2005 and are intended to state reliability goals in a manner that is unambiguous and measurable.
On August 14, 2003, an electric power blackout cascaded across large portions of the Northeast and Midwest United States and Ontario, Canada, affecting an estimated 50 million people and disrupting 61,800 megawatts of electric supply.
On April 5, 2004, a joint U.S.-Canadian task force, which the commission participated in, issued a final report on its blackout investigation and identified the causes of the blackout. The report found that several entities violated NERC operating policies and planning standards, and those violations directly contributed to the start of the blackout. The report found that due to a variety of institutional issues, the NERC standards were unclear, ambiguous and nonspecific, making it possible for bulk power system participants to interpret these standards in widely varying ways.
The new NERC reliability standards are designed to help address this finding. For the press release or to read the order, see the FERC Web site.
