, a culmination of seemingly small failures by the power grid, its monitoring software, and human operators quickly cascaded into theto ever occur in North America. Power outages spread throughout the Northeast and Midwest United States, as well as into Ontario, Canada, with an estimated 50 million people losing power.
These regional entities also develop and enforce region-specific reliability standards when needed. For example, in the four regions of the Eastern Interconnection there is a standard to coordinate how to relieve transmission when the system is at risk of overloading from high electricity demand. These balancing authorities include RTOs, independent system operators , and utilities in regions not under an RTO or ISO . NERC’s reliability standards are the north star for the technical operations of this electricity supply and demand balancing act. But given the critical role of balancing authorities to the grid, NERC also enforces standards that go beyond these technical operations and into issues such as communication protocols, security , and data reporting for future planning.
The above entities should give you a good sense of how the bulk power system works together, but there are other players that contribute to grid reliability under NERC’s jurisdiction. Notably, there are groups that coordinate between these different pieces and plan regional longer-term needs for reliability.. FERC acts in an oversight role and must approve all standards that are developed by NERC.