It’s all about communication.

That was one of the big takeaways for ISO-NE after last year’s GridEx VI, the biennial grid security exercise put on by NERC.

In a presentation to the NEPOOL Reliability Committee on Tuesday, ISO-NE’s manager of control room operations, Jonathan Gravelin, laid out some of the grid operator’s lessons learned from the November 2021 exercise.

The two-day exercise, a smaller affair than in past years because of the COVID-19 pandemic, incorporated elements of some of the major cyberattacks from around the world in the past year. (See GridEx VI Incorporates Recent Cyber Lessons.)

It also threw a Nor’easter into the mix of hypotheticals, adding extra strain to the simulated grid in New England, as well as some additional offshore wind to get an accurate picture of the future energy mix.

In New England, the scenario resulted in 12,000 MW of lost generation from cyber and physical attacks on transmission and natural gas infrastructure, according to Gravelin’s presentation. The events and manual load shedding led to, at its peak, 3.5 million customer outages in the region.

Among the strengths of ISO-NE’s simulated response, Gravelin said, was that the region maintained communication effectively, in part because of technology that’s been introduced since the pandemic.

The system also effectively started shedding load, he said, using process improvements from previous exercises. And emergency reporting from ISO-NE provided “valuable data and information in a consolidated format for timely decision-making.”

The response wasn’t all rosy though.

ISO-NE will be looking to find ways to improve its 21-day forecast of expected energy deficiencies, which could be more flexible.

There were also some aspects of communication that should be improved, Gravelin said, like presenting a “unified message” for coordinating requests for government help.

And finally, ISO-NE needs to go deeper in exploring how the modeling and operation of renewable resources would play into major events like those simulated.

“The recommendations suggest a task-force type approach to collaborate and gather information and knowledge across impacted parties,” he said.