FERC technical conference on reliability, inverter-based resources, and cybersecurity

U.S. utility regulators have scheduled a technical conference to discuss policy issues related to the reliability of the Bulk-Power System, in response to shifts in the nation's electric generation fleet away from large, central coal-fired power plants toward more distributed renewable resources. The meeting could inform future policy reforms, such as tighter reliability regulation of smaller-scale solar and wind facilities.

Section 1211 of the federal Energy Policy Act of 2005 amended the Federal Power Act to grant jurisdiction to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission over all users, owners and operators of the bulk-power system (except in Alaska and Hawaii), for purposes of approving reliability standards and enforcing compliance. The law defines the bulk-power system as including facilities and control systems necessary for operating an interconnected electric energy transmission network as well as electric energy from generation facilities needed to maintain transmission system reliability, but not including facilities used in the local distribution of electric energy.

On February 3, 2020, the Commission issued a Notice of Technical Conference in Docket AD20-7. According to the notice, the Commission will hold a technical conference on Thursday, June 25, 2020, from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, "to discuss policy issues related to the reliability of the Bulk-Power System... including: (1) the changing resource mix; (2) inverter-based resources and inverter-connected distributed energy resources; and (3) cybersecurity."

Each of these issues is not novel to the Commission. It has previously noted changes to the nation's portfolio of electric generating resources, including large-scale retirements of coal-fired power plants and additions of new renewable facilities and natural gas-fired power plants. Some generating resources, such as typical solar or wind facilities, use equipment called an inverter to change direct current to alternating current. As electric reliability organization NERC has found, inverter-based resources' response to fluctuations on the grid are typically driven by advanced controls, unlike traditional synchronous generators whose response is driven by the laws of physics and classical mechanics, and many inverter-based generators are small-scale distributed resources that fall below some thresholds for reliability regulation. The Commission's jurisdiction over the reliability of the bulk-power system includes responsibility for cybersecurity, an authority it has used to adopt mandatory cybersecurity reliability standards.