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In letters issued Wednesday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers from the U.S. House of Representatives’ Energy and Commerce Committee requested an update from heads of several federal agencies — including Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm — on their response to last year’s SolarWinds cyberattack. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm | Department of...

The February winter storm and resulting dayslong outages in Texas loomed large over Thursday’s meeting of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, with members pressing representatives of the electricity sector for an explanation of the events and assurances that they are working to prevent future mass failures. Sen. Joe...

The Government Accountability Office on Wednesday urged FERC and the Department of Energy to develop strategies for responding to increasing stresses on the electric grid from climate change. GAO’s report cites threats to transmission and distribution lines from increased wildfire activity and predictions of more frequent droughts and changing rainfall...

More than half the U.S. coal fleet could be retired by 2025 to reduce emissions and generating costs, with no harm to reliability, according to a new report by the Rocky Mountain Institute. Based on an analysis of NERC data, RMI says 27% of the coal fleet — mostly in...

NERC and the regional entities pushed back last week on FERC’s proposal to shorten the time between the organization’s performance assessments from five years to three, warning that the change would force it to "redirect staff resources from … issues facing the" bulk power system (RM21-12). FERC pitched the move...

FERC has accepted a settlement between WECC and NorthWestern Energy for violations of NERC reliability standards, under which the utility will pay $205,000 to the regional entity in addition to performing other mitigation activities. NERC submitted the settlement to FERC in a notice of penalty in January, which the commission...

Map of ongoing outages in Texas. As of 3:17 p.m. Feb. 18, more than 375,000 outages were still reported statewide. | PowerOutage.US FERC Chairman Richard Glick said Thursday he may seek new reliability standards to ensure generators and grid operators are prepared for severe winter conditions following this week's devastating...

Joseph McClelland, FERC | NARUC Large-scale replacement of computer systems "may be the only option" for some users of SolarWinds, FERC’s Joseph McClelland told NARUC attendees. Large-scale replacement of computer systems "may be the only option" for some users of the compromised SolarWinds Orion network management software to ensure there...

Although grid resilience has become an increasing concern for regulators, their efforts have been reactive, resulting in pilot projects but no consistent policies or metrics for measuring success, speakers told the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners’ Winter Policy Summit on Thursday. "We haven’t found any commission in the country...

FERC last week approved a settlement between ReliabilityFirst and ITC Holdings subsidiary Michigan Electric Transmission Company (METC) for violations of NERC reliability standards, along with a separate settlement between RF and Michigan Power (NP21-5). The METC violation carries a $125,000 penalty, but no monetary damages were assessed for the Michigan...