NLR and North American Electric Reliability Corporation Launch Partnership To Advance North American Grid Reliability

Collaboration Will Advance Research and Technical Insights Needed To Support Reliable, Resilient Energy Future for More Than 400 Million North Americans

Aug. 19, 2026 | By Madeline Geocaris | Contact media relations

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The National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR) and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) announced a new partnership to advance the reliability of the North American bulk power system.

The organizations will work together to better understand how the power system is changing and identify new opportunities to keep electricity reliable and affordable.

“This partnership allows us to apply NLR research directly to the reliability challenges facing today’s grid,” said Kate Anderson, director of the Grid Planning and Analysis Center at NLR.

“By working alongside NERC, we can translate decades of U.S. Department of Energy investment in energy research into practical tools and insights that help keep the lights on for communities across North America,” added Bethany Frew, group manager for the Price Signals for Grid Services group at NLR.

The partnership will initially focus on integrating NERC’s high-resolution data, including more precise asset location information, into NLR’s grid-modeling capabilities. This will enable researchers to represent the power system in greater detail and support more sophisticated analysis of future reliability challenges.

The organizations expect the collaboration to inform new approaches to power system planning and reliability analysis across the industry.

“By combining NERC’s reliability expertise and NLR’s research capabilities, this partnership will allow us to enhance our organizations’ analytical capabilities, improve coordination on reliability research, and identify new opportunities to address future reliability challenges,” said John Moura, director of Reliability Assessments and Performance Analysis at NERC.

The partnership builds on a longstanding relationship between NLR and NERC researchers, including decades of collaboration through NERC events and a November 2025 visit that brought NERC and NLR grid-reliability researchers together to explore opportunities for deeper technical collaboration.

“Working with NERC has been one of the highlights of my time at the laboratory,” said Sinnott Murphy, an NLR grid researcher.

Surya Dhulipala, an NLR grid researcher, also said, "I'm particularly looking forward to the two-way exchange this partnership offers—contributing our hands-on experience with wide-area probabilistic assessments, while collaborating directly with the leading authority on grid reliability to help advance more robust, forward-looking resource adequacy methodologies across the industry."

NERC is a not-for-profit, international regulatory authority dedicated to effectively and efficiently reducing risks to the reliability and security of the bulk power system. NERC works with owners, operators, and consumers as well as federal, state, and provincial regulators across North America to develop and enforce mandatory reliability standards, monitor the grid, train personnel, and assess risks to ensure that the grid remains reliable and secure today and in the future.

Learn more about NLR’s grid modernization and energy systems analysis research.