Weeks after gunfire damaged two substations that led to widespread outages in Moore County, North Carolina, a federal commission has ordered an Atlanta-based nonprofit corporation to evaluate the physical security of what some have called the “Achilles heel” of North American infrastructure: the Bulk Power System (BPS).
The BPS encompasses four major electric system networks that serve the United States and Canada, divided into Western, Texas, Eastern, and Quebec.
Last week, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) tasked the nonprofit North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) with studying and reporting on the potential upgrades to its Physical Security Reliability Standard, initially approved by the commission in 2014….