Preparing the electric grid for coronavirus

As the world deals with pandemic illness due to a novel coronavirus, the electric reliability organization responsible for the bulk power grid in most of the United States is taking steps to prevent impacts to the reliability of the electric grid, including requiring NERC-regulated entities to acknowledge receipt of six recommendations and to report back on their preparedness.

The coronavirus-related disease known as COVID-19 is a respiratory disease caused by a novel virus first identified in Wuhan, China on December 8, 2019. Since its discovery, the virus and related illness have spread internationally.

NERC, or the North American Electric Reliability Organization, is the designated electric reliability organization for the U.S., charged with ensuring the reliability of the North American bulk power system. On March 11, 2020, NERC issued an announcement, a Level 2 NERC Alert recommendation, and a guidance document from the Electricity Subsector Coordinating Council providing resources on assessing and mitigating the virus's impacts.

As part of the Alert, NERC offers six specific recommendations to industry, including:

• Develop and maintain suitable situational awareness of the current status of the spread of COVID-19 and credible future estimates of its spread and impacts. Incorporate the CDC’s most current travel advisories into event planning and travel arrangements, and consider practices to increase awareness of employees’ personal travel plans to areas with active advisories.
• Reinforce good personal hygiene practices across the workforce. Consider measures to increase the frequency and extent of cleaning and disinfecting surfaces and equipment that comes into routine contact with multiple people, particularly in business critical spaces or confined spaces that may be more conducive to disease communicability. Such areas may include control rooms, shared vehicles, conference rooms, and break areas. Consider implementing additional access restrictions such as limiting visitors or non-essential meetings within these spaces, and segregation of crews on shift work schedules.
• Review and update existing business continuity plans to ensure they are adequate to mitigate the direct impacts of a pandemic outbreak in the organization’s footprint that creates staffing constraints for reliability and business functions. Recognize that a pandemic outbreak affecting the organization will also have similar effects on third-party contractors and supporting resources in the same footprint. Validate or develop thresholds and triggers for implementing increased flexible workforce arrangements and for more disruptive mitigations, and ensure these mitigations are harmonious with guidance from the CDC or PHAC and local health agencies. Consider testing or exercising business continuity plans against a pandemic scenario.
• Assess the organization’s resilience against disruption to the availability of critical components, materials, and support resources with supply chains originating or traversing significantly impacted regions globally. At the present time,this includes China and nearby southeast Asian nations, so the most likely impact is expected to be to electronics, personal protective equipment and sanitation supplies, chemicals, and raw materials that are eventually transformed into goods directly purchased and used by North American asset owners and operators. Global transportation disruptions will also have ripple effects on the availability of these goods, particularly for “just-in-time” logistics systems. Organizations should work with their suppliers to understand current inventories of critical components throughout the supply chain as well as their anticipated use and resupply rates, and identify changed risks to routine, planned, and contingency operations to prioritize efforts appropriately.
• Assess the need to adjust planned construction and maintenance activity schedules to prioritize the most important projects.Consider third-party support requirements and facility outage windows, and understand consumption rates of spare parts and supplies required for both planned and contingency work.Adjust plans as needed to maintain safe and reliable operations through potential workforce availability or supply chain disruptions.
• Anticipate and prepare for coronavirus-themed opportunistic social engineering attacks. Spearphishing, watering hole, and other disinformation tactics are commonly used to exploit public interest in significant events. Take steps to ensure continued visibility and maintenance of cyber assets in the event of staffing disruptions.Ensure information and communications technology resources are appropriate to accommodate increased use of remote work arrangements consistent with business continuity plans, without compromising security. Consider conducting planned stress tests for these arrangements.

Under NERC's rules of procedure, NERC registered entities are required to acknowledge receipt of the advisory within the NERC Alert System by midnight Eastern on March 12, and to report to NERC on the status of their activities in relation to the recommendation by midnight Eastern on March 20. NERC will then aggregate the data from U.S. respondents and provide an anonymized report to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.