Reinventing the Relationship Between Operators and Regulators

The sharing of information, such as the root cause of misoperations and the lessons learned from those events, has long been a valuable part of the overall efforts of the power industry to improve the reliability of electric power. However, the fear of audits, noncompliance fines, competitive disadvantage, and lawsuits has injured our ability to discuss, teach, and learn. We share a responsibility to work together to improve power system reliability.At the Modern Solutions Power Systems Conference in June 2014 in Houston, Texas, a panel discussed these topics in a fourhour session. The panel consisted of Kristian Koellner, supervisor of system protection at the Lower Colorado River Authority; Michael Moon, senior director of regional entity coordination at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation; Mark Henry, director of reliability at Texas Reliability Entity, Inc.; Martin Golden, partner and attorney at Keogh, Cox, & Wilson, Ltd. (a professional law corporation); Christopher Hart, acting chair of the National Transportation Safety Board; and David Costello, the technical support director at Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, Inc. This paper is an edited transcript of the audio and video recordings of the presentations and discussions from that session. The discussion addresses the following questions and concerns. Are present regulations and compliance efforts improving reliability? What best practices of other industries can we follow? What can be done to balance required mandatory and enforceable standards with the sharing of information? How can our industry move toward an environment where safe harbor is provided to good people who are trying to do the right thing?