NERC drops the other shoe (that makes at least three, with more probably coming)

If you’re looking for today’s pandemic post, go to my new blog. If you’re looking for my cyber/NERC CIP posts, you’re come to the right place.

In March, NERC announced that there would be no onsite audits (or any other onsite activities) until June 1. Today, they announced that this date has been extended to September 1. Of course, this applies to all NERC standards, not just the CIP standards.

This is hardly surprising. Some states (including mine, Illinois) just pushed back the end of sheltering in place until the end of May, and there’s no assurance it won’t have to be extended beyond that. Now that it’s a little more than a month until June 1 (although you wouldn’t know it from the Chicago weather, which has been as disappointing as it’s ever been in what’s euphemistically called “spring” here), it would be unthinkable to even start planning to restart audits on June 1. If we’re still locked down at the end of June, I imagine NERC will consider pushing back audits another 2-3 months, as well as perhaps pushing back the CIP-013 date again until January 1 (although things will still have to be pretty bad for them to do this. I would hope by the end of June there would be some certainty about when the lockdowns will end, even if they haven’t ended then – although I don’t want to use the phrase “light at the end of the tunnel”).

Stay safe!

Any opinions expressed in this blog post are strictly mine and are not necessarily shared by any of the clients of Tom Alrich LLC. If you would like to comment on what you have read here, I would love to hear from you. Please email me at tom@tomalrich.com. Are you working on your CIP-013 plan and you would like some help on it? Or would you like me to review what you’ve written so far and let you know what could be improved? Just drop me an email!