North American power transmission grid
[2] In the United States in the 1920s, utilities formed joint operations to share peak load coverage and backup power.
[1] The Energy Policy Act of 1992 required transmission line owners to allow electric generation companies open access to their network[3][4] and led to a restructuring of how the electric industry operated in an effort to create competition in power generation.
No longer were electric utilities built as vertical monopolies, where generation, transmission and distribution were handled by a single company.
Now, the three stages could be split among various companies in an effort to provide fair accessibility to high voltage transmission.
TSOs can be of two types: Independent System Operators (ISOs) and Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs).
The members of the Regional Reliability Councils include private, public and cooperative utilities, power marketers and final customers.
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) is a nonprofit corporation based in Atlanta, Georgia, and formed on March 28, 2006, as the successor to the National Electric Reliability Council (also known as NERC), which formed in the wake of the first large-scale blackout in November of 1965.
"[7] NERC oversees eight regional reliability entities and encompasses all of the interconnected power systems of the contiguous United States, Canada and a portion of Baja California in Mexico.
NERC's major responsibilities include working with all stakeholders to develop standards for power system operation, monitoring and enforcing compliance with those standards, assessing resource adequacy, and providing educational and training resources as part of an accreditation program to ensure power system operators remain qualified and proficient.
NERC also investigates and analyzes the causes of significant power system disturbances in order to help prevent future events.
In 2009, the Tres Amigas SuperStation was planned to connect the Eastern, Western and Texas Interconnections via three 5 GW superconductor links.
The Western Interconnection is the other major alternating current (AC) power grid in North America.
The Texas Interconnection is one of the three minor alternating current (AC) power grids in North America.
[12] The Quebec Interconnection is tied to the Eastern Interconnection with four high-voltage direct current power transmission lines (DC ties), and with one variable-frequency transformers (VFTs) line, which isolate the unsynchronized AC frequencies of each side.
Thirty-seven states plus the District of Columbia took some action to modernize electric grids in the first quarter of 2017, according to the North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center.
