NERC CEO Jim Robb told the ERO’s trustees the organization has offered to assist its European counterparts as they investigate the recent mass blackout in the Iberian peninsula, while warning that it is “way too early” to draw any conclusions about the cause of the issues. 

Robb’s comments at the May 8 meeting of NERC’s Board of Trustees in Washington, D.C., echoed those he made at a joint meeting of FERC and the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners on April 30. (See FERC-NARUC Collaborative Examines Ongoing Issues with Gas-electric Coordination.)  

They were similar to the remarks of Teresa Ribera, European Commission executive vice president for a clean, just and competitive transition, who on May 5 criticized what she called a “trigger-happy attitude” blaming renewable energy for the outages.  

Nearly the entire population of Spain and Portugal, along with parts of France, lost power on the afternoon of April 28, with electricity restored for most of the peninsula only the following day. Spain’s grid operator said the same week that the outages began with two separate generation loss incidents in the country’s southwest, but it has not identified their exact location. 

Robb drew parallels between the Iberia outages and the Northeast blackout of August 2003, which “changed so much about how we approach reliability of the [power grid] here in North America.” He also compared the incident to “some of the things we’ve seen in West Texas, California and Utah,” an apparent reference to previous grid disturbances including the Odessa disturbances of 2021 and 2022 when multiple renewable generation resources tripped offline. (See NERC Repeats IBR Warnings After Second Odessa Event.) 

While Robb advised listeners that “it’s probably best to … let [investigators] do their work,” he named a few areas in which NERC is particularly interested, such as the relative lack of inertial generation on the peninsula and the “frequency loss and voltage control that comes along with that.” He also mentioned the use of natural gas to restart the Iberian grid, which touches on questions that NERC has been studying about the North American grid’s black start capability.  

In addition to offering to help the European Energy Information Sharing and Analysis Centre with its investigation, Robb said the ERO plans to give a full briefing at FERC’s open meeting in June about the Iberian outage and its implications for North American customers. 

FERC Chairman Mark Christie, who also attended the meeting, assured Robb he was looking forward to NERC’s report and urged the ERO to “keep telling the truth.” He also expressed his hope that FERC’s upcoming technical conference on resource adequacy June 4-5, which will feature presentations from Robb as well as CEOs of the RTOs, would be “critically important” and “a seminal moment in American energy policy.” 

Kim Shares Section 321 Analysis

The board meeting featured a presentation from Soo Jin Kim, NERC’s vice president of engineering and standards, on the ERO’s use of its special powers under Section 321 of NERC’s Rules of Procedure to streamline the standards development process. 

NERC’s board has invoked its Section 321 powers twice so far: in August 2024 to move forward with standards on inverter-based resources (IBRs), and in January 2025 for a proposed cold weather standard. In both cases the ERO was facing a FERC-imposed deadline that trustees feared they could not meet through the normal stakeholder process, with standards having failed to garner enough votes in formal ballot periods. 

Kim acknowledged that the Section 321 process had been “very time consuming” and “a strain on resources” for both industry and NERC, even though both uses resulted in standards being submitted to FERC. She said the ERO staff has been working to identify the contributing factors in the development of the cold weather standard that required the board to invoke the special authority. 

So far, NERC has identified several common elements, Kim said. First, many of the comments received during the ballot period were not helpful and in some cases “contradicting … the original FERC order and the directives that were issued,” leaving the standard development team unsure how they could address industry concerns while still satisfying the commission’s mandate.

“Process inefficiencies” also contributed to the ERO’s inability to finish the standard in time, Kim said, naming the difficulty of assembling a standards development team given the limited availability of industry stakeholders as an example. In addition, she said miscommunication between NERC and industry at key moments kept the project from meeting its goals. 

NERC staff members are working on recommendations for both the ERO and industry to address these issues, Kim said. For industry, these include working out ways for interested employees to participate in NERC’s drafting teams, work groups and task forces; improving metrics for measuring the progress of standards development projects; and revising the process and timing for FERC engagement.  

Recommendations for NERC include figuring out how new participants can get involved in the standards process and enhancing the process for holding technical conferences, which formed an important part of the Section 321 cycle for both the IBR and the cold weather standards. 

RDA Updates, IBR Alert Approved

Trustees also approved changes to NERC’s regional delegation agreements at the meeting, ahead of their expiration at the end of the year. The RDAs set out NERC’s relationships with the regional entities, including their authority to engage in compliance monitoring and perform reliability assessments. They now will be filed with FERC, to take effect Jan. 1, 2026. 

In addition, the board approved a Level 3 alert setting out essential actions for registered entities to take regarding IBR performance and modeling. These include enhancing the generator interconnection and planning policies, performing a review of IBRs currently on the system to determine the accuracy of their models, and implementing process to verify the accuracy of models used in the interconnection and planning processes.