FERC Proposes Rule Granting Commission Access To NERC Data

On September 17, 2015, the Commission issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking ("NOPR") in which it proposed to amend its regulations to require the North American Electric Reliability Corporation ("NERC") to provide the Commission and Commission staff with on-going, non-public access to three NERC databases: (i) the Transmission Availability Data System ("TADS") database; (ii) the Generating Availability Data System ("GADS") database; and (iii) the protection system misoperations database.  According to the Commission, the proposal is intended to provide the Commission with "information necessary to determine the need for new or modified Reliability Standards and to better understand NERC's periodic reliability and adequacy assessments."