WECC said Tuesday that Steven Noess, NERC‘s director of regulatory programs, will join the West’s regional entity as its new vice president of reliability and security oversight beginning April 29.
Noess will take over a role previously filled by Steve Goodwill, who last fall became WECC’s senior vice president of strategic engagement.
At NERC, Noess leads a working group that supports “the alignment, effectiveness and oversight” of the Compliance Monitoring and Enforcement Program (CMEP) activities within the ERO Enterprise, according to a WECC release.
He recently co-led a team of 50 experts on the FERC-NERC inquiry into the February 2021 cold weather event that caused numerous outages and derates across Texas, leading to the largest manually controlled load-shedding event in U.S. history. (See FERC, NERC Release Final Texas Storm Report.)
In his new position, Noess will oversee development of WECC’s own CMEP and manage teams within the RE’s Oversight department, including Entity Monitoring, Risk Assessment and Registration, and Enforcement and Mitigation.
“Steve [Noess] brings in-depth oversight knowledge to the role, which will enable him to immediately take the lead in this critical position,” WECC CEO Melanie Frye said Tuesday in a statement. “His extensive ERO Enterprise-wide regulatory knowledge, coupled with his ability to successfully collaborate with external stakeholders to achieve reliability goals, will be an additional asset for WECC.”
Noess joined NERC in May 2011 as a standards developer, a position in which he led efforts to complete version 5 of the ERO Enterprise’s Critical Infrastructure Protection program, according to his LinkedIn profile. He was subsequently promoted to the roles of director of standards development and director of compliance assurance and program oversight before taking on his current position.
Prior to joining NERC, Noess was an attorney at the Minnesota legislature, where he managed development of legislation related to economic development, employment law and business and professional codes/licenses. He also helped develop administrative rules for executive branch agencies. He previously served as a captain in the U.S. Army and was deployed to Iraq in 2003, where he was awarded a Bronze Star.
Noess is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and holds a Juris Doctor from the University of Minnesota.
