Industry participants support federal efforts to limit acquisition of foreign-manufactured hardware but warn that rooting it out of existing systems "presents significant challenges," according to responses to FERC’s inquiry on reliability risks from such bulk electric system equipment (RM20-19). FERC issued its Notice of Inquiry in September in response to...

FERC last week ordered revisions to NERC’s pro forma regional delegation agreement (RDA) and its RDAs with all regional entities while approving the agreements overall (RR20-5). The new RDAs took effect Jan. 1. NERC filed the agreements with FERC in June after the Board of Trustees approved the pro forma...

Citing "general agreement" within the electric industry about the potential benefits of virtualization and cloud computing services, FERC on Thursday ordered NERC to make an informational filing on possible modifications to the critical infrastructure protection (CIP) reliability standards to allow their use (RM20-8). Thursday’s order follows a Notice of Inquiry...

The Department of Energy on Thursday issued a prohibition order barring some U.S. utilities from acquiring equipment from China, citing concerns that the Chinese government "is equipped and actively planning to undermine the [bulk power system]." Affected by the order are utilities that supply critical defense facilities (CDFs), defined by...

FERC on Thursday proposed incentives to encourage public utilities to make cybersecurity investments above and beyond the requirements of NERC’s Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) standards. "As we’ve seen recently in the news this rulemaking cannot be more timely," FERC Chairman James Danly said at the commission’s open meeting Thursday, referring...

Supply chain rules from NERC and the federal government are increasing costs and procurement cycles for utilities and technology vendors, cybersecurity experts said yesterday. The recent cyber breach of SolarWinds’ Orion product, which gave Russian hackers access to multiple federal agencies, "really is a wakeup call," Tom McDonnell, power generation...

Manny Cancel, NERC | NERC Foreign adversaries continue to hone their cyber threat strategies against the North American bulk power system, cybersecurity experts told the Midwest Reliability Organization’s (MRO) Annual Member and Board of Directors Meeting on Thursday. "The bad guys have not taken the pandemic off; they’ve seen it...

Four-star Gen. Wesley Clark retired from the Army after a 38-year career that saw him wounded as an infantry commander in Vietnam and rise to become commander of the U.S. Southern Command and the U.S. European Command. He helped write the U.S. National Military Strategy and Joint Vision 2010 for...

Chris Krebs, founding director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), was fired Tuesday night by President Trump, leaving a leadership void at an agency that has provided significant cybersecurity assistance to the utility sector since 2018. Trump announced Krebs’ departure on Twitter, saying a...

The Department of Energy’s latest assessment of transmission congestion has concluded there is no need to designate national-interest electric transmission corridors, citing the "dramatic increase" in transmission investment since 2005. But it said future assessments should address the grid’s resilience and the threats posed by cyberattacks and natural disasters. The...