Statement on European Outages

While the cause of the massive outage across the Iberian Peninsula is currently unknown, it stresses the importance of preparation, vigilance and collaboration across our industry. Events like this one, and other recent events, remind us of the importance a reliable electricity supply is for nearly all aspects of modern society.

In North America, NERC takes a comprehensive approach to safeguarding the reliability and security of our interconnected bulk power system including mandatory and enforceable Reliability Standards, guidelines, industry webinars, and the publication of regular reliability assessments as well as updates like the one shared by the E-ISAC on this event today. We are working diligently to develop appropriate insights to protect our grid as industry transforms, becomes more impacted by extreme weather, deals with significant load growth for the first time in decades, and manages a highly complex cyber and physical security environment. The E-ISAC continues to monitor the situation and will provide updates via its secure portal as necessary.

This defense-in-​depth approach, in collaboration with industry, and federal, state and provincial stakeholders, helps ensure we are prepared, able to mitigate and recover from potential significant impacts such as the one affecting 50 million Europeans today. The reliability of the North American grid is the key priority for NERC-we know 400 million North Americans are counting on an uninterrupted supply of electricity to support our way of life.