NERC’s latest reliability assessment is unreliable
By
David Wojick
|
May 22nd, 2025
The North American Energy Reliability Corporation (NERC, rhymes with jerk) has just released its 2025 Summer Reliability Assessment (SRA). NERC is a quasi-federal agency under the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC, also rhymes with jerk).
NERC’s mission is to keep America’s grid reliable, which it has clearly failed to do. The nonsensical language in the SRA helps explain this failure. There is a deep fallacy that lets NERC systematically avoid saying how bad things really are.
This fallacy is the dangerously misleading use of the word “normal.” Here is a good example (out of many). Their basic finding is that “all areas are assessed as having adequate anticipated resources for normal summer peak load conditions.”
This sounds very reassuring, as does the whole report. The fallacy is that there is no such thing as “normal” summer conditions for a given day, week, month, or season. They really mean average conditions, and these are rare, not normal.
https://www.cfact.org/2025/05/22/nercs-latest-reliability-assessment-is-unreliable/
