ATLANTA – Bob Cummings, senior director of Engineering and Reliability Initiatives, retired today from NERC following his distinguished career spanning more than 40 years at NERC and in the industry. He joined NERC in 1996 after almost two decades of grid planning and operations experience in the Eastern and Western Interconnections.
In his first few years at NERC, Cummings helped develop the now widely used practice of e-tagging to track the sources of bulk power system electrons and the developed the concept of an interchange distribution calculator to predict and control transmission congestion in the Eastern Interconnection.
At NERC, Cummings also led the investigation into the August 2003 Northeast Blackout. Cummings worked with experts from industry and government in the United States and Canada to produce the technical analysis supporting the U.S.–Canada Power System Outage Task Force report, which pointed out the need for mandatory and enforceable standards that could ensure the reliability of the bulk power system. Cummings participated in the dialogue that led the organization to call for mandatory, enforceable Reliability Standards in 1997. Following the 2003 blackout, Cummings created NERC's System Protection and Control Task Force — NERC's first effort in the critical reliability area of system protection.
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