Spotlight Articles

Today's LiveWire Spotlight examines NERC’s 2021 Situational Awareness Webinars, the latest NERC-sponsored annual assembly assessing the role of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and Energy Management Systems (EMS) in BES…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight addresses the fourth of four half-day webinars probing the human performance (HP) aspects of BES reliability with a goal to reduce errors that lead to outages. This…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight looks at the latest release of a spreadsheet tool developed by the ERO Enterprise controlling the process used to collect compliance evidence used in cyber security audits. …

Today's LiveWire Spotlight deals with the Project 2022-01 Standards Authorization Request (SAR) proposing to change the definition of Reporting Area Control Error (Reporting ACE) to allow every Interconnection to implement…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight focuses on three Standards Authorization Requests (SARs) related to the long-term modeling and analysis of inverter-based systems.  The propose the following standards modifications: 1. Update TPL-001-5 to clarify…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight contains our analysis of NERC’s Notices of Penalty in 4Q2021 - providing the facts, risk appraisals, and mitigations for 22 substantive non-CIP findings reported by RFC, SERC, TRE, and…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight examines FERC’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NOPR) looking to act on findings from two devastatingly-successful cyber-attacks that may have been deflected if early warnings of hostile compromise had been…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight looks at NERC’s 2021 Long-Term Reliability Assessment - their most recent annual evaluation of BPS reliability, adequacy, and security over the ten-year planning horizon.  The assessment identifies five key…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight examines a newly released CMEP Practice Guide which outlines the actions expected of Compliance Enforcement Authorities (CEAs) to assure uniformity in their evaluations of the physical security risk…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight looks at NERC’s 2021 Frequency Response filing with FERC - the first year that the BAL-003-2 method is used to derive the four North American Interconnection Frequency Response…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight examines the second revision of the Standards Authorization Request (SAR) for Project 2021-06: Operational Data Exchange Simplification.  The SAR team has tightened the focus of the original draft…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight evaluates NERC's efforts to make current an adjunct procedure supporting EOP-010-1, the NERC standard that governs operations preparedness for geomagnetic disturbances (GMD).  The procedure applies to a…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight looks at the draft updates to a technical guideline developed by NERC’s Real-Time Operating Subcommittee in 2018 addressing the detection of cyber security breaches.  The new version leaves…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight examines FERC Order 881, which adopts key provisions of 2020’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NOPR) to require the universal application of more precise transmission line ratings.  The…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight looks at the initial drafts of FAC-001-4 and FAC-002-4 - which are intended to remove the ambiguity in the two Facility Interconnection standards regarding the identification of…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight deals with a Standards Authorization Request (SAR) submitted by a NERC Registered Entity (Tri-State Generation and Transmission) looking for clarity surrounding the derivation of generator Facility Ratings in…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight looks at the second draft of CIP-012-2, which adds FERC-directed controls to protect the availability of Control Center-to-Control Center data used for Real-time Assessments and monitoring.  In response…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight examines a NERC analysis of 220 Energy Management System (EMS) events where a latent failure mechanism manifested itself unexpectedly and resulted in a threat to Bulk Electric System…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight examines NERC's final Standards Development Plan which prioritizes the standards development activity that they expect to process between between 2022-2024 in coordination with the industry and North American…

Today's LiveWire Spotlight looks at the third of four NERC Human Performance Webinar Sessions held in 2021 probing the human performance (HP) aspects of BES reliability. The Session III presenters…