Manny Cancel, a senior vice president at NERC who has headed the Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center (E-ISAC) for the past four years, will retire early next year, NERC said in a statement April 29. Stan Hoptroff, NERC’s vice president of business technology, also will leave the ERO in 2025, the statement said.
NERC plans to begin looking for candidates to fill both roles this summer and has retained executive search firm Heidrick and Struggles to manage the search.
“Both Manny and Stan have been exceptional teammates to NERC, the ERO Enterprise and our stakeholders. They have provided wise counsel and been stalwart contributors to our executive team as we navigated numerous challenges over the past years, and they will both be sorely missed,” NERC CEO Jim Robb said. “For both, this is their second retirement, and I wish them the best after their stellar careers in our industry. And I appreciate the time they have given us to prepare for their succession.”
Cancel joined NERC in January 2020, replacing Bill Lawrence as E-ISAC head. (See Former Con Ed Exec to Lead E-ISAC.) Before the ERO, he was chief information officer at Con Edison, where he was active on the Member Executive Committee, an advisory group for the E-ISAC.
His tenure as E-ISAC head has seen a marked rise in physical threats to grid reliability as well as damage to electric equipment. Some of these threats have political motivations, such as the neo-Nazi leader who allegedly plotted to damage substations in Baltimore to start a race war. Other attackers have smaller-scale goals, like the men accused of damaging electric facilities in Washington state to cover up a burglary. In the case of the Moore County, N.C., rifle attacks of December 2022, no suspects or motives have been identified.
Electronic threats also remain a major area of concern for the E-ISAC. In a media call earlier this month, Cancel said the center has seen a “dramatic increase in malicious cyber activity” amid rising geopolitical tensions between China and Taiwan, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s military actions in Gaza. (See Robb, Cancel Review Reliability Landscape.)
Cancel has represented the industry before Congress and in other forums such as the ERO’s annual GridSecCon security conference, and has overseen the past two iterations of the biennial GridEx security exercise.
Hoptroff has been with NERC since 2014; his previous positions at the ERO include chief technology officer. Before NERC, he worked with Southern Co. for 33 years in a variety of technology-related roles.
While at NERC, Hoptroff has had “overall responsibility for developing and overseeing the company’s IT strategy, systems, applications, budget and personnel,” according to his page on the ERO’s website. He has led such initiatives as the ERO’s Align software platform and Secure Evidence Locker, which went live in 2021 with the goal of collecting compliance and enforcement activities of NERC and the regional entities into a single secure platform.
