NERC is working to enhance its Long-Term Reliability Assessments and make them more useful for industry stakeholders amid a rapidly changing energy environment, Mark Olson, the ERO’s manager of reliability assessments, said in an online workshop Nov. 12.

Speaking to the 2025 Planning and Modeling Virtual Seminar, hosted by NERC, the North American Transmission Forum and the Electric Power Research Institute, Olson said NERC’s LTRAs “are critical to talking to stakeholders about what the concerns are … and we rely on industry information to make these reports credible.” But he also said the ERO has noticed “limitations” in its current approach to the assessment that make the resulting document less informative in this environment.

“For a long time, we were managing the risks that were associated with a changing resource mix and new resource types,” Olson said. “In recent years, as you’re all well aware, with data centers and electrification and the speed [at] which load can request to come onto the system, the resource adequacy challenge has changed.”

NERC publishes the LTRA each December based on information collected from the regional entities, with the goal of “identifying trends, emerging issues and potential risks during the upcoming” 10 years. Olson observed that the LTRA originally was “designed around capacity-based methods,” with heavy emphasis on planning reserve margins.

The ERO introduced probabilistic assessments to the development process, which “have become more and more energy-based [to] take into account the energy limitations of resources,” Olson said. However, methods of performing probabilistic assessments can vary between regions, which means the resulting LTRA can be inconsistent and confusing to stakeholders.

To bring more consistency to the LTRA, Olson said the REs for the Eastern, Western and Texas Interconnections are collaborating this year on interconnection-wide energy assessments. The REs used off-the-shelf software to create a common platform and standardize the assumptions that would go into their reports.

Olson emphasized that this is a pilot program that is “about building the capability to do the work” rather than providing a “reliability takeaway” for this year, and the results will not be published in the 2025 LTRA. Nevertheless, he praised the REs’ work for setting the foundation for future interconnection-wide assessments.

“This is really something we’re pretty proud of,” Olson said. “In the past, some [REs] would perform an assessment over their entire … footprint. But for this work, each [RE] was coordinating with their neighbor regions across the interconnection and coming with the same assumptions … and resolving challenges as they went. All of these regions working off of a common tool, and a common model of the interconnection, is a pretty big step.”

Olson said NERC also has benefited from the Interregional Transfer Capability Study, which the ERO filed with FERC in 2024 as ordered by Congress in the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023. Not only were the REs’ interconnection-wide assessments based in part on the models used for the ITCS, but the 2025 LTRA could make use of the data collected for the study.

“This is really about adding to our LTRA a level of information that helps us understand how non-firm transfers can help resolve risks. It also brings in transmission adequacy or transfer capability into our assessments … on an interconnection-wide scale, and we haven’t had that in the past,” Olson said. “It will really set the stage for scenarios where [if] you want to look at, say, fuel outages, fuel events or wide-area cold weather [or] heat domes, those kind of things, we’ll have an interconnection-wide energy analysis model that would allow us to study that.”