Electricity Forum

United States -- - The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission FERC recently accepted the second Performance Assessment of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation NERC, finding that NERC continues to satisfy the statutory and regulatory criteria for certification as the nation^^s Electric Reliability Organization ERO.

The Performance Assessment highlights NERC's ability to develop and enforce Reliability Standards, and discusses how NERC is improving the performance of, and mitigating risks to, the Bulk-Power System as related to avoidable outages.

Additionally, the Performance Assessment explains how NERC's compliance monitoring and enforcement efforts have matured over the past five years to provide industry with greater certainty on actions, outcomes, and reliability consequences.

While accepting the Performance Assessment, FERC also directed NERC to take certain actions to improve NERC's effectiveness as the ERO by, among other things, continuing to improve consistency and develop performance and reliability metrics in order to track NERC's operations going forward.

"This order reflects the Commission's continued confidence in the work of NERC and the Regional Entities REs in strengthening the reliability of the Bulk-Power System," FERC Chairman Cheryl LaFleur said. "At the same time, it appropriately challenges NERC and the regional entities to further strengthen their efforts."

FERC certified NERC as the ERO on July 20, 2006, and NERC filed its initial Performance Assessment in 2009, on the three-year anniversary of its certification.