PJM Members last week approved revisions to the Operating Agreement to allow PJM to share non-public operational information with natural gas pipelines and local distribution companies.

WASHINGTON -- A panel headed by former CIA and NSA chief Michael Hayden today recommended an expansion of the electric industry’s cybersecurity efforts, saying the current efforts by FERC and NERC fail to protect the distribution system.

PJM and other grid operators will face unprecedented reliability challenges in the next several years as federal environmental regulations and low energy and capacity prices threaten to sideline baseload coal and nuclear capacity, federal and PJM officials told state regulators.

At this year's NARUC winter meeting, Senators told state regulators they had little hope of passing comprehensive cybersecurity legislation or finding a solution for the nuclear waste stalemate this year.

FERC and NERC cautioned against overreacting to last year's substation sabotage, with two FERC commissioners taking a swipe at a former colleague who has been sounding the alarm.

Two members of the Senate Energy committee cited PJM to support their concerns about the impact of the Environmental Protection Agency’s pending greenhouse gas regulations.

FERC will hold a technical conference April 1 to discuss issues raised by this winter’s extreme cold, which exposed vulnerabilities in the grid’s increasing reliance on natural-gas fired generation.

Wednesday’s ice storm cut power to more than 1 million in the Philadelphia area, with Peco Energy recording a new winter outage record. RTO Insider Editor Rich Heidorn Jr. was there and brings you all the details.

News briefs from the states within the PJM footprint. This week we include Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

Four out of five Reliability Must-Run generation units in the ATSI zone will shut down this year rather than 2015.