By Rich Heidorn Jr. WASHINGTON — They may not know how to design firewalls or recognize malware, but lawyers are nonetheless essential to companies’ cybersecurity protections, says Paul Tiao, co-chair of Hunton Andrews Kurth’s energy sector security team. Paul Tiao, Hunton Andrews Kurth | © ERO Insider "Lawyers have an...

By Rich Heidorn Jr. In the first 16 months after its creation in 2017, NERC’s Inverter-Based Resource Performance Task Force produced four disturbance reports, two alerts, several webinars and a reliability guideline. Its latest creation could be considered its Greatest Hits. "I refer to it as a comprehensive guide for...

By Rich Heidorn Jr. NERC is accepting comments until Nov. 4 on the second draft of a revised standard to improve the ride-through performance of inverter-based resources (PRC-024-3: Frequency and Voltage Protection Settings for Generating Resources). Members of a Los Angeles Fire Department strike team read smoke behavior as they...

By Rich Heidorn Jr. The NERC Standards Committee on Wednesday delayed the posting of a standard authorization request (SAR) by SPP on generator weatherization because of a competing proposal from the Edison Electric Institute. SPP proposed the SAR in response to the joint FERC and NERC staff report on the...

By Rich Heidorn Jr. NERC will begin testing the newest version of its situational awareness tool in mid-November, which will add the ability to integrate transmission feeds with other sources such as real-time weather station data and radar. Situational Awareness for FERC, NERC and the Regional Entities (SAFNR v.3) was...

By Rich Heidorn Jr. The electric grid cannot be protected against electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) without guaranteed cost recovery and more access to classified information, NERC’s Electromagnetic Pulses Task Force concluded in a draft Strategic Recommendations report released for comment Friday. The task force, created in response to President Trump’s March...

By Rich Heidorn Jr. An electric industry-funded report on high-altitude electromagnetic pulses (HEMPs) underestimated the risks the grid faces and should not be used as the basis for mitigation, according to a critique released this week by a little-known group with ties to Maxwell Air Force Base. In April, the...

By Christen Smith VALLEY FORGE, Pa. — PJM stakeholders last week expressed concern that transmission owners’ proposed procedure for eliminating vulnerabilities to "critical" transmission assets could undermine FERC-ordered transparency rules. Critical infrastructure protection standard CIP-014-2 requires physical security plans for "highly critical" transmission assets — those "that, if rendered inoperable...

By Rich Heidorn Jr. FERC and NERC on Tuesday asked for comment on a proposal to change how they disclose information on violations of critical infrastructure protection (CIP) rules. FERC and NERC staffs published a white paper outlining proposed changes to their current procedures, which they said "may not be...

The NERC Standards Committee last week approved posting for industry comment the Evidence Retention Report produced by the Standard Efficiency Review (SER) Phase 2 team, which recommends reducing the number of evidence retention schemes to eight from the current more than 50. Unless otherwise specified, the default retention period would...