Extreme heat and drought conditions are once again a major cause for concern in the Western Interconnection, while the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is likely to drive uncertainty across the North American electric grid, according to FERC’s 2021 Summer Energy Market and Reliability Assessment. In the report issued Thursday during the...

Wednesday’s hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy was nominally about the Department of Energy’s 2022 budget request for $46.2 billion. But the issue clearly top of mind for many representatives and Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, the hearing’s sole witness, was the recent Colonial Pipeline cyberattack...

The San Francisco Bay Area energy system currently has 10,000 "control points," according to Martin Keller, laboratory director at the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). But in the fast-approaching future of grid-interactive buildings — in which individual buildings will have multiple, programmable energy devices — that total...

In response to last week’s ransomware attack against Colonial Pipeline, President Biden on Wednesday issued an executive order aiming to improve cybersecurity preparedness in both the public and private sectors. The hack — which the FBI has attributed to the Eastern European criminal organization DarkSide — led Colonial to shut...

The ERO Enterprise has once again extended its pandemic-related regulatory relief measures initiated last year, this time through the end of 2021. However, in its announcement Monday NERC said that further extensions are unlikely "given anticipated developments in COVID-19 response throughout 2021." Originally intended to remain in place from May...

Cybersecurity experts say that last week’s ransomware attack against Colonial Pipeline, which led to the ongoing shutdown of the network that carries almost half the supply of gasoline, diesel and other fuel products to the U.S. East Coast, provides a graphic reminder of the rapidly evolving landscape of cyber threats...

In the wake of the ransomware attack Friday on Colonial Pipeline that shut off almost half the supply of gasoline, diesel and other fuel products for the eastern U.S., FERC Chairman Richard Glick and Commissioner Allison Clements on Monday called for "mandatory cybersecurity standards," similar to NERC’s Critical Infrastructure Protection...

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) | U.S. Senate After the Protecting Resources on the Electric grid with Cybersecurity Technology (PROTECT) Act stalled in Congress last year, leaders of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Thursday announced they had reintroduced the bipartisan legislation that would provide $250 million over the...

More than 40 electric industry professionals, regulators and academics joined this week’s EnVision Forum, sponsored by FERC and Virginia Tech. The two-day event — held virtually because of the COVID-19 pandemic — explored the "bold visions, novel theories and creative partnerships" needed to address the "innovations and limitations that are...

When FERC issued Order 2222 in September, then-Chair Neil Chatterjee declared it a "landmark … that paves the way for the grid of tomorrow" by opening RTO/ISO wholesale markets to participation by aggregations of distributed energy resources. Realizing the potential of DERs — including storage, electric vehicles and rooftop solar...