Power sector supply chains, hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, are feeling the double whammy of uncertainty posed by a broad U.S. executive order.
As was clear at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC’s) July two-day virtual technical conference to assess the pandemic’s impact on the energy industry, COVID-19 has introduced multiple uncertainties for the power sector. Summarized by the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC), the most crucial risks posed by what it called a “people” event, focus on maintaining critical staff needed to operate and maintain the bulk power system (BPS) and mitigating supply chain issues. The latter, as the Edison Electric Institute’s Philip D. Moeller noted, has been vastly compounded by financial troubles posed by “decreased demand, lower commodity prices, reduced access to credit and reduced market liquidity, increased delinquencies, insolvent customers/unrecoverable defaults, lower and/or more volatile stock prices, construction delays, and lags in rate recovery.”
As a number of participants at the conference pointed out, supply chain issues haven’t yet cropped up in any substantial way, mainly…
