VMI77 wrote:How do the Feds get involved? FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) gives orders to NERC (North American Electric Reliability Corporation), and NERC is the quasi-governmental agency with the legal authority to enforce reliability regulations. FERC is increasingly dominating NERC. NERC is increasingly dominating the industry. 10 years ago NERC was a minor irritant with reliability rules that, for the most part, were common sense --probably didn't even take up 1% of my time. Today complying with the rules of the NERC bureaucracy easily takes up 25% of my time. Sometimes, such as during an audit period, NERC requirements can take 100% of the time of several people in our organization for weeks at a time. Companies have hired people solely to deal with NERC rules. NERC compliance consumes an incredible amount of resources.
Here's the thing: NERC doesn't care about reliability, and so apparently, neither does FERC. It's all about appearances. NERC is an onerous and gigantic paperwork bureaucracy that has nothing to do with actual reliability. Fundamentally, if a company was 100% reliable by whatever measure, but didn't have their paperwork in order, they'd be in violation of NERC and get fined (an audit btw only looks at your paperwork, not your actual reliability). OTOH, a company that is 80% reliable and has all their paperwork in order will pass their NERC audit with flying colors.
Right now the administration of the system is somewhat tolerable because the auditors here were basically split off from ERCOT, and they understand the ERCOT system and apply common sense and reason to their judgments during their audits. Of course, that doesn't mean they aren't responsible for enforcing a lot of onerous and silly rules that not only have nothing to do with reliability, but are actually counterproductive. They are counterproductive in a number of ways, but the most immediate way is they divert resources away from actually planning, designing, and operating the system to satisfying a paperwork bureaucracy.
That sounds like OVERregulation not DEregulation.