Will there (n)ever be any more face-to-face NERC meetings?

If you're looking for my pandemic posts, go here.

About a month ago, WECC asked their members whether they would be interested in having their September compliance meeting be conducted onsite or entirely online. I was surprised then that they would even ask the question, but I’m sure they wouldn’t even consider asking it today – given the crisis situations in two WECC states (Arizona and California), as well as rapidly growing cases in other states like Montana, Idaho, Oregon and Utah (where WECC is headquartered, of course). I’m not stretching at all when I say there will be no face-to-face meetings scheduled by NERC or any of the NERC Regions until next year.

And the real question isn’t even when NERC person-to-person meetings will resume next year; it’s whether they’ll resume at all next year – or for that matter, any year after that, until a safe, effective, and affordable vaccine for Covid-19 is developed and deployed to enough people (roughly 70% of the world population) that herd immunity will protect everybody. It will certainly be at the very least 3-4 years before this happens, even assuming the needed vaccine is developed next year.

A few “fun” facts:

1. It took twenty years to eradicate smallpox, and that’s the only disease that has been eradicated.
2. 40 years after AIDS appeared, there’s still no HIV vaccine.
3. The SARS outbreak (caused by another coronavirus) happened 18 years ago, and there’s no vaccine for SARS yet, either. In fact, just about the fastest a vaccine for any disease was developed (let alone deployed to the general population) was four years, and that was for mumps.
4. When the WHO announced last week that the novel coronavirus could be spread through aerosols, this effectively showed that there's no such thing as a "safe" in-person meeting (unless perhaps everyone sits in their own glass booth with their own air filtration system. But that doesn't fit most people's definition of an in-person meeting!). If the air is constantly being replaced with outside air, or if it's filtered and recirculated, these measures will certainly help, but they're not a guarantee of safety (of course face masks and social distancing aren't a guarantee, either).

Does this mean I don’t think there will be meetings of any sort in the US for years? No. But here’s why I think NERC (and Regional) meetings will be just about the last to come back:

1. They’re really not “essential”. What’s essential in the power industry has to be discussed in real time, since a delay in responding by even seconds can cause serious problems. For that reason, there are conference calls all the time (of course, NERC doesn’t have real-time responsibility for the grid. That’s the job of the ISOs, RTOs and BAs). The onsite meetings are about issues like compliance, which can usually be handled almost as well using virtual means (as MRO has been proving with their recent excellent webinars on cybersecurity and CIP compliance – which are mostly open to anybody, by the way. MRO announced a month ago that their usual later-fall compliance workshop would be held virtually. What really surprises me is that other Regions haven’t all announced the same thing by now. They either will or they won't have them at all).
2. By definition, the power industry is dispersed across North America. Any NERC meeting is guaranteed to have people from most states and provinces of the US and Canada. When you have a situation, as we do now, where some states are having severe outbreaks and other states are recovering from their outbreaks or never had a bad outbreak in the first place, bringing all these people together in one room almost guarantees spread from impacted states to less-impacted ones. In fact, some states like Illinois and New York are now requiring people coming from other states – even returning residents – to quarantine for 14 days. That alone probably kills almost all national meetings for any group until there’s a lot more uniformity among the states (and not uniformity in the fact that they’re all in terrible shape!).
3. There are a lot of people over 60 who attend NERC meetings (yours truly being one of them). Given the dramatically higher likelihood of dying from Covid-19 in that demographic, the disease will need to be almost eradicated in the US before they’ll feel safe attending. Looking in the papers this morning, there isn’t much evidence that Covid-19 is anywhere near being eradicated in the US!
4. Some utility employees who are needed for real-time operations, especially in Control Centers, are effectively banned from travel. A friend of mine, who is a senior person in one of the most important Control Centers in the US, told me this week that he’s sure he’ll never be allowed to travel anywhere until the pandemic subsides. The risk to the organization simply isn’t worth it.

Of course, I’ve attended a lot of NERC and Regional meetings, and I’ll be the first to say that I got a lot out of all the personal interaction, both after hours and at lunch and breaktime. This is a loss, pure and simple. One of millions of losses caused by the fact that the US has for the most part let the novel coronavirus run rampant, and we’re still very far from containing it, let alone defeating it.

I think NERC and the Regions should all plan on making all meetings virtual through the end of 2021. Maybe in the second half of next year, things will start to improve and there might possibly be some combination face-to-face and virtual meetings. But that won’t happen if things continue on their present course. If they do, we’ll be asking next year whether there will ever be face-to-face NERC meetings again, not when they’ll happen.

But here's an optimistic note: There are a lot of advantages to virtual meetings, the biggest being that no travel is required - so there can be much bigger "crowds". If NERC and the Regions stopped thinking there will be onsite meetings next year (including GridSecCon) and instead put some creativity into planning virtual ones, we'd all be a lot better off.

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 hot at work – or should be – on getting ready for CIP-013-1 compliance on October 1? Here is my summary of what you need to do between now and then. I'd be glad to discuss this with you if you want to drop me an email.