Spotlight Articles

Today's LiveWire Spotlight examines NERC's Standards Grading Review for 2022 - marking the sixth year since the program was transitioned from an Independent Expert Review Panel to a five-member Periodic…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight looks at FERC’s Four-Year Strategic Plan outlining a series of goals, objectives, and strategic priorities supporting their mission to provide consumers reliable, safe, and reasonably priced energy.  The…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight assess three more NERC Lessons Learned - these addressing scenarios where human errors made during operations planning and design threatened electric system reliability.  The document authors urge…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight examines three NERC Lessons Learned where latent generator frequency control and Energy Management System (EMS) defects threatened BES reliability.  The documents look to enlighten industry of the effect that subsystem…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight examines the descriptions, resolutions, and the penalties assessed for NERC Reliability Standards’ violations from January 1 thru March 31, 2021.  The article provides the facts, risk assessments,…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight looks at NERC’s Final Report for Grid Security Exercise (GridEx) VI held virtually last November.  At that time, 3,000+ participants from multiple industries (water, electricity, natural gas,…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight reviews a joint report issued by NERC and WECC analyzing four 2021 incidents in CAISO where an unwarranted number of solar photovoltaic (PV) facilities failed to ride through routine…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight evaluates 200+ stakeholder comments to the draft mandatory data request updates related to generator design and outage detail data equipment owners must enter into NERC’s Generating Availability…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight examines a proposed Standards Authorization Request (SAR) issued by the Energy Reliability Assessment Task Force (ERATF) addressing deficiencies in the historical analyses of available energy capacity driven…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight looks at NERC’s twelfth filing of the Directives Status Report summarizing the latest status of open Commission rulings.  In it, the ERO announces four directives were closed within the last…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight examines 29 sets of post-event responses to two FERC-sponsored conferences held last year to explore options that enable the electricity markets to deal with the increasing penetration…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight looks at a “teachable moment” where manual underfrequency load shedding (UFLS) options were reduced to the point where normally excluded service had to be disconnected to preserve BES…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight examines a deficiency notification issued by FERC to NERC questioning the lack of underlying support given to a proposed modification to their Rules of Procedure submitted last August.  The update…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight examines the second draft of CIP-003-X, which specifies the low impact cyber security supply chain controls in Attachment 1, Section 6.  The latest posting offers surprisingly few updates…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight looks at FERC’s letter approving without comment the retirement of FAC-010-2, and the updates to FAC-011-4 and FAC-014-3 – i.e., the System Operating Limit (SOL) standards.  The…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight looks at the second draft of the Standards Authorization Request (SAR) for Project 2021-02 - which greatly expands the scope of NERC’s initiative to clarify the thresholds at which…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight is the second of two articles dealing with the modified updates to the CIP standards enabling the use of virtualization services without affecting legacy perimeter-based architectures.  Last…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight is the first of two articles dealing with the modified updates to the CIP standards enabling the use of virtualization services without affecting legacy perimeter-based architectures.  Today’s article…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight looks at a newly released NERC Technical Reference detailing various methods to detect and mitigate wide-area oscillations.  The document explains how to (1) conduct analyses that determine the…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight describes the latest Operator Certification Program Manual - the Personnel Certification Governance Committee’s (PCGC’s) official program document describing how System Operators may obtain and retain NERC credentials.  The…