By Holden Mann

Bob Cummings, NERC’s senior director of engineering and reliability initiatives, has retired from the organization after 24 years, NERC said on Friday.

Cummings joined NERC in 1996, having spent nearly 20 years working in grid planning and operations in the Eastern and Western interconnections. His early contributions to the organization included helping develop the practice of e-tagging, which helps to track the flow of electricity across the bulk power system, along with the concept of predicting and controlling transmission congestion in the Eastern Interconnection with an interchange distribution calculator.

Following the Northeast blackout of 2003, Cummings led the investigation into the incident and created NERC’s System Protection and Control Task Force. He later created the organization’s event analysis program and directed it for five years, either leading or working on analyses for 12 major bulk power system disturbances. He also served as the principle investigator on the Arizona-Southern California outage of September 2011 and the D.C. area low-voltage disturbance event of April 7, 2015.

“Bob’s commitment and passion for bulk power system reliability has served as an inspiration for industry and the ERO Enterprise,” Mark Lauby, senior vice president and chief engineer at NERC, said in a press release. “His leadership has led to significant contributions helping to ensure the continued reliability of the bulk power system.”

Since 2018, Cummings has served on the Department of Energy’s Electricity Advisory Committee. The committee assists in coordination between DOE and other federal agencies, state governments and industry on electric reliability and emergency response; coordinates electricity policy issues; and monitors developing generation, transmission and distribution issues. He has also contributed to updating the standards of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers to address reliability issues related to system protection and renewable resources.

“The rapid pace of change on the bulk power system — meaning the move from a fuel-diverse, central-station model with large reserve margins to a fast-ramping, tightly managed system consisting largely of natural gas and renewable resources — has been the greatest challenge and reward of my career,” Cummings said. “Addressing the reliability risks posed by today’s bulk power system paradigm requires more flexible resources and a more flexible engineering-based approach to planning and operations.”