By Kennedy Maize
The North American Electric Reliability Council told the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission yesterday (Feb. 19) that the high-voltage electric transmission system in major parts of the U.S. and Canada faces serious, long-term threats to reliability.
Briefing FERC, NERC’s John Moura, director of reliability assessment, said the 2025 Long-Term Reliability Assessment report “is a call to action.” Looking 10 years into the electric system reliability, Moura said, “What the assessment shows is clear. It is not a prediction of outages. It is a risk assessment,” and the risk is increasing. NERC’s analysis, Moura said, is “based on what we know today, using data submitted to mid-2025.”
Nor is the problem simply a matter of generation resources, but also of how the regional transmission systems are configured and how well they perform under stress. That requires a detailed and dynamic examination of how the system is working and how it can be stressed.
“If you take one thing away today,” Moura said, “a prediction tells you what will happen. A risk assessment tells you how exposed you are if stress occurs. What this assessment shows is clear, risk is increasing, not because we lack awareness of the issue but because the system is changing faster than the infrastructure needed to support it.”
Moura stressed that risk is “not just about capacity, but about energy risk. There are periods when resources may not be available, or deliverable.” Examples include cases such as frozen pipes in severe winter, shutting down gas generation. There are circumstances where reserve margins are inadequate in predicting risks, he said, so NERC uses probabilistic tools to get at the innards of how the systems work.
Following the NERC presentation, FERC Chairman Laura Swett commented, “I think you said it best, Mr. Moura, that this is not a forecast of failure but a call to action and we are ready to act. Maintaining the status quo guarantees crisis.”
Commenting on the tendency of some who look at favored and unfavored resources, Commissioner David Rosner commented that when it comes to keeping the system running — a veiled jab at the White House — “We need all the electrons…You take any piece out and we are not reliable.”
Going forward, Moura said in response to a question from Commissioner Judy Chang, “large load uncertainty is a very new thing.” He said NERC is going to have to distinguish between the characteristics of new load in much the same way it has long looked at new generation: what is solid and imminent, what has met a lot of milestones, and third, what is not quite so predictable, and then everything else.
“We don’t do that with load, because we have never had to,” Moura said. “We had a lot of confidence in what was coming in,” That’s no longer the case, so NERC “will have to put in some steering structure to understand all the data we are getting.” He said that is something NERC “will be developing for this year, applying it for next year.”
On the reliability issue, FERC at the February meeting approved five reliability standards developed by NERC for inverter-based resources — primarily wind and solar — that generate direct current that must be converted to alternating current for grid transmission. The action was a followup to FERC’s 2023’s Order 901, telling NERC to develop standards for inverters over the next three years.
That order was a reflection of the rapid growth of inverter based resources on the grid, as solar and wind have been growing far faster than any other forms of electric generation over the past several years.
Following FERC’s action at the February meeting, a NERC news release said, “Today’s approval represents meaningful progress toward addressing those issues by enhancing grid reliability.” As it looks at the complexities of the changing electric system, NERC is performing a series of four high-level studies, which it calls “milestones.” NERC said “Milestone 4 work, addressing directives relating to planning and operational studies, is currently underway with an expected completion date in advance of FERC’s November 4, 2026 deadline.”