As of June 18, 2007, utilities and other bulk power industry participants that violate any of the reliability standards will face enforcement actions by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), regional reliability entities, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), under federal law.

The August 2003 blackout that affected 50 million people in northeastern and Midwestern areas of the United States and Canada prompted Congress to make reliability standards mandatory and enforceable via the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Pursuant to the same statute, the FERC approved NERC as a self-regulatory "electric reliability organization" to develop and enforce the reliability standards on July 20, 2006. The mandatory and enforceable reliability standards relate to the planning and operation of the bulk power system, and cover areas such as balancing customer demand with generation supplies, emergency operations, cyber-security, vegetation management and disturbance reporting. In this new era, corrective measures to ensure compliance with reliability standards can be ordered and fines of up to $1 million a day can be imposed for failure to comply.

There are more than 1,400 entities involved in functions necessary to ensure a reliable bulk power system that must comply with NERC’s reliability standards. NERC, working with eight "regional entities" under delegation agreements approved by the FERC, monitors compliance with the reliability standards and imposes enforcement actions when violations are identified. W&T attorneys work with utilities, regional transmission organizations (RTOs) and other interested entities to provide input on the development of NERC, the regional entities and the reliability standards they administer and enforce. Our attorneys counsel clients in reliability-related investigations and audits. We also assist clients in identifying compliance issues, as well as help them resolve these issues quickly and efficiently.