MANHATTAN BEACH, Calif. — NERC’s ERO Enterprise Effectiveness Survey will be discontinued after this year, Kristin Iwanechko, associate director of regional and stakeholder relations, told the Member Representatives Committee on Wednesday, after industry participants called the biennial exercise “complicated, inefficient, ineffective and duplicative.”

NERC introduced the survey in January 2015, originally planning to conduct it annually, but changed to a biennial schedule the following year. NERC management decided to review the survey approach at the previous MRC meeting in November amid growing skepticism about its usefulness. (See “Changes to ERO Effectiveness Survey,” NERC MRC Briefs: Nov. 5, 2019.)

“The time and effort for stakeholders to complete the survey and for staff to review and analyze responses is substantial, and survey responses have generally not provided new information or concerns,” NERC said. “Ratings have not varied significantly, and the resulting action plans duplicated actions that were already being taken or already planned.”

Iwanechko said NERC’s efforts to get stakeholder input will continue through existing channels such as standards development processes and committee meetings. The organization may still conduct shorter, more targeted surveys among fewer recipients; these will be coordinated with regional entities and the Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which is considering similar efforts.

Sterling Takes Office as MRC Chair

Jennifer Sterling of Exelon took over as MRC chair for 2020 from Georgia System Operations’ Greg Ford, having been named to the post at the committee’s last meeting. Paul Choudhury of BC Hydro succeeded Sterling as vice chair.

“It’s not lost on me that when I look at the list of past chairs of the MRC and the stakeholder committee before it, it’s basically a who’s who of people in this industry,” Sterling said. “And so I feel like I’m standing on the shoulders of giants, and that opportunity is something that is really impactful and incredibly meaningful to me.”

Search Begins for New Board Members

MRC members voted to approve the nominations of Chair Roy Thilly, Suzanne Keenan and Jim Piro to NERC’s Board of Trustees, serving three-year terms to expire in February 2023. Keenan and Thilly were re-nominated, their current terms having expired. Piro, former CEO of Portland General Electric, joins the board as Trustee Fred Gorbet and Vice Chair Janice Case depart. The board plans to reduce its ranks from 12 to 11 in 2020, so the class of 2023 will have only three members.

The nominating committee has also begun to search for replacements for former Trustee David Goulding, who retired in January, and current Trustee Jan Shori, who will finish her 12th year on the board next February, making her ineligible for another term. (See “Search for Canadian Trustee,” Former Con Ed Exec to Lead E-ISAC.)

Thilly told the MRC that while Schori’s seat will be filled by the end of the year, the committee has chosen to accelerate the schedule for Goulding’s successor because the board is required to have at least two Canadian trustees. The departure of Gorbet leaves Colleen Sidford as the board’s only member from Canada.

“They need to be separate in any event, because we need a Canadian search firm, we’ve learned, for the Canadian [trustee],” Thilly said. The committee will aim to identify a shortlist of five candidates by the May MRC meeting, with interviews to be conducted in June and the new Canadian representative to be seated in August.

Departing Board Members Honored

MRC members approved a resolution to honor Case and Gorbet on their retirements. Both have served as NERC trustees for more than a decade: Case joined the board in 2008, and Gorbet in 2006.

Case spent nearly 25 years rising through the ranks at Florida Power (now Duke Energy Florida) prior to joining NERC. Her time at the organization includes two stints as vice chair — in 2013 and 2019 — as well as serving on the Finance and Audit and Technology and Security committees. She described the greatest benefit of serving on NERC’s board as the ability to make a difference in the reliability and security of the grid in North America.

“I would just remind everyone in this room that you, too, are making a difference and should feel very good about your roles in the ER organization,” Case said.

Gorbet served as NERC’s chair from 2013 to 2017 and currently sits on the Compliance and Enterprise-wide Risk committees while serving as the international liaison and new member mentor for the organization. He called the past 14 years an “extraordinarily special” learning opportunity and urged the MRC to continue working to improve the resilience of the bulk power system.

“I think that the challenges we are facing are more complex, more difficult, and coming at us faster than they ever have before,” Gorbet said. “But I also think that we are in a position to understand and appreciate better than we ever have been before … and so I leave with an awful lot of confidence.”

— Holden Mann