Unknowns & Uncertainty

About this risk area

Beyond the list of risks we know exist, we must also be ready for the unknown risks we don’t yet know about. What is the next risk, the one we don’t know, and we are not talking about? New risks to the electric grid are always lurking and we must position ourselves as well as possible to face the uncertainty that inevitably awaits on the horizon.

One of our organization’s goals is becoming more proactive at identifying emerging risks and threats to the grid. This starts with our staff, where we bring together industry subject-matter experts as well as professionals from diverse technical and non-technical backgrounds to help identify emerging risks.

Our approach also includes reaching out and learning from other regions, countries, and critical infrastructure industries. We can actively learn from challenges faced by the natural gas industry, water industry, financial sector, communications, etc. We attend external workshops and webinars from industry partners (ESIG, IEEE, EPRI, etc.) to learn about risks and threats outside our current portfolio of North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) Reliability Standards and we have tools such as NERC Alerts and Reliability Guidelines to communicate risks outside of the standards. We participate on industry task forces in collaboration with the NERC Reliability and Security Technical Committee.

And finally, we have enhanced our Data Analytics team and capabilities to help us find emerging risks and trends. We have implemented new dashboards to help us more quickly identify these risks.