FERC & NERC
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is the United States federal agency with jurisdiction over interstate and wholesale electricity sales, hydroelectric, natural gas, liquefied natural gas and oil pipelines. The U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005 expanded FERC's authority to impose mandatory reliability standards on the bulk transmission system and to impose penalties on entities that manipulate the electricity and natural gas markets. In turn, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) is a non-government organization which in 2007 was granted the status of the Electric Reliability Organization (ERO) by FERC and more recently by two Canadian provinces. ERO status enables NERC to prescribe compliance standards, adjudicate compliance, and levy monetary penalties.
Energy, Utility and Pipeline enterprises must comply with the regulations and standards set down by FERC and NERC. With the establishment of these two bodies and their associated regulations, enterprises have more standards and policies that they must comply with than ever before.
For example, FERC performs the following:
Monitors and investigates energy markets;- Uses civil penalties and other means against energy organizations and individuals who violate FERC rules in the energy markets;
- Oversees environmental matters related to natural gas and hydroelectricity projects and major electricity policy initiatives; and
- Administers accounting and financial reporting regulations and conduct of regulated companies.
NERC requires particular Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) reporting, such as:
- Sabotage reporting
- Critical Cyber Asset Identification
- Security Management Controls
- Electronic Security Parameters
BWise not only can enable compliance with FERC and NERC regulations, but BWise also has experience working in the Energy, Utilities and Pipeline industries. The BWise GRC platform serves several enterprises in this sector.
The BWise Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) solution platform enables Energy related enterprises to comply with NERC and FERC, to continually monitor that compliance, and ultimately report on its compliance internally and to external parties. Reporting, in particular, is very an important aspect of NERC guidance , especially in the case of its required the incident reporting required by NERC guidance.
The Compliance Management component of the BWise GRC platform enables a corporation to map its compliance, easily track compliance issues and omissions, perform a risk analysis on particular compliance initiatives, and finally create an overview of compliance with full reporting and dashboards. Internal aAuditors and Rrisk mManagers can use the BWise solution to find and focus in on key non-compliance issues, ultimately diving deep down to find the source of non-compliance and tracking the issue in the future. Both financial and organizational incidents can be found and tracked in the solution; for example energy price manipulation for FERC compliance and sabotage or vandalism reporting for NERC compliance.
