Guiding Principles for Reliability Assessments Under EPA's Clean Power Plan

This MJB&A whitepaper proposes six guiding principles for use in reliability assessments of EPA’s Clean Power Plan.  The whitepaper provides a brief background on electric reliability through the lens of past environmental programs and then uses this context, as well as a review of ongoing stakeholder dialogue and already-conducted Clean Power Plan-focused reliability assessments, to identify possible common elements and guiding principles for use in ongoing and future studies.  We believe that existing reliability planning procedures are a strong foundation for assessments so long as they are conducted in keeping with this standardized set of guiding principles, which are to: (1) utilize a transparent process; (2) reflect existing status of the grid in modeling assumptions; (3) clearly identify base case and context; (4) conduct sensitivity/ probabilistic analyses where possible; (5) reflect the flexibility of compliance options under the CPP; and (6) provide realistic but reliability-focused results.