Long-term Strategy

Our “Why”

Electricity is an essential part of the fabric of modern life.

WECC strengthens that fabric to preserve and improve society’s future. Our “why” is at the heart of all we do, because we know what happens when the power goes out—gas systems fail, water pumps cease to operate, communication networks shut down, emergency services are impaired, economies are affected, people panic, and lives are lost.

electric posts near tress under clear sky at daytime

The Western Interconnection is a complex system of interconnected generation, transmission, and distribution that provides reliable electric services to over 90 million people in all or part of 14 states, two Canadian provinces, and parts of Baja, Mexico. The system is owned and operated by various investor-owned utilities, public power utilities, municipal utilities, co-ops and power marketers, while being subject to the authority and oversight of state and provincial regulators, state energy offices and, ultimately, actions by state and provincial lawmakers. The Western Interconnection is at the forefront of development of many new energy resources. Energy policies vary significantly from state to state and province to province, and the extremes of all types of weather are felt across its expansive footprint.

The Western Interconnection is also changing at a magnitude and pace that is unparallelled. Those who plan, operate, and care about the reliability of the interconnection must confront challenges more frequently—increasingly recurrent extreme natural events, large-scale generator retirements to meet aggressive clean energy goals, massive amounts of new generators that present new technological and dispatchability challenges, evolving and increasing cyber- and physical threats, the risks and opportunities posed by artificial intelligence, rapidly changing demand brought about by electrification, and the proliferation of data centers and other technologies, with their accompanying large loads. In short, change is affecting everything, everywhere, all at once.

WECC, as the only entity in the West with an interconnection-wide view, occupies a crucial place within the interconnection. With our focus solely on reliability, WECC serves as the independent, interconnection-wide voice of reliability in the Western Interconnection. To ensure we are a trusted partner into the future and to fulfill our mission to effectively and efficiently mitigate risks to the reliability and security of the Western Interconnection’s Bulk Power System, we must continue to elevate our organizational health and organizational performance.

The ERO Enterprise

At WECC, our Long-term Strategy, with its five Impact Areas, deliberately aligns with the ERO Enterprise Long-term Strategy and its four Focus Areas.

We are unified in our reliability and security mission with NERC (the ERO) and the other Regional Entities of the ERO Enterprise. NERC and the Regional Entities play different, but important and complementary, roles. NERC provides industry-wide perspective and oversight, while the Regional Entities have features and activities that serve the needs of their regional constituents. The partnership between NERC and the Regional Entities is critical to the success of the ERO Enterprise.

The Independent Voice of Bulk Power System Reliability in the Western Interconnection

WECC is a non-profit, public interest organization dedicated to promoting the reliability and security of the Western Interconnection. As the Regional Entity in the West with delegated authority to perform critical reliability and security functions, WECC has a unique value proposition that promotes reliability through three principles: Independence, Perspective, and Partnership.

Impact Areas

Our strategy focuses on five identity-centric Impact Areas that promote a future in which we continue to realize our vision of a reliable and secure bulk power system in the Western Interconnection.

Impact Area 1: We are an organization aligned on risk reduction. Our holistic risk-based approach uses all the tools and skills available to deliver comprehensive risk mitigation strategies.

We will develop cohesive, well-coordinated strategies to identify and mitigate risks to reliability and security that are effective and use all the tools at our disposal. To ensure that our risk-based approach will meet the challenges facing the Western Interconnection, we will:

Work collectively from, orient on, and live by a single, company-wide register of risks that drives a holistic, coordinated, comprehensive, one-WECC mindset and approach to identifying, prioritizing, and mitigating reliability and security risks.

Use effective and coordinated implementation of resources (e.g., oversight, event analysis, reliability assessments, outreach, strategic engagement, internal and external relationships, training) and skills across the organization in support of identifying and reducing risks to reliability.

Create an environment in which industry participants in the Western Interconnection focus on how to proactively identify and mitigate risks to reliability and security, as opposed to focusing solely on compliance risk.

Impact Area 2: We are sought after as a partner to address the risks that pose the greatest threat to reliability. We identify concerns and facilitate solutions with input and assistance from diverse and often conflicting stakeholder perspectives, focusing our resources on risks that pose the greatest threat to reliability and security.

We will create an environment and framework in which stakeholders share their known and emerging reliability risks with us and seek to partner with us to address their related needs and concerns, actively engage in our oversight and risk identification programs, gather and share impact data and relevant considerations related to the identified risks, and implement collectively identified risk-mitigation strategies. To ensure we are sought after to help address reliability and security challenges in the Western Interconnection, we will:

Develop a stakeholder engagement model that preserves our interconnection-wide view and enables our stakeholders to collaborate with us in a way that strengthens our independence, enabling us to perform world-class monitoring and oversight and to produce timely, relevant work that informs reliability and security in the Western Interconnection.

Use our unique perspective as both a regulator and a partner to ensure that our stakeholders rely upon and value us.

Collaborate and prioritize our resources and work across WECC to foster the necessary partnership and coordination with stakeholders that maximizes our impact on the most important reliability topics, while ensuring we do not expend resources on low-impact activities.

Impact Area 3: Our insights, analyses, and outreach drive industry action. We are renowned for providing clear and actionable communications supported by data and rigorous analysis.

We will produce products that our broad range of stakeholders rely on as authoritative sources to inform conclusions and resulting actions. To ensure that our communications and publications are celebrated by their targeted audiences for being timely, clear, and compelling, we will:

Enhance existing and create new modes of training, outreach, and communication.

Use the latest technologies and tools available to acquire the data we need, to understand and analyze that data, and to manage the data in an exemplary manner.

Produce communications and publications that are technically rigorous while being tailored to their intended recipients and are delivered timely to the stakeholders who need them.

Impact Area 4: Our resource- and technology-neutral, interconnection-wide perspective is respected and trusted to assure decision-makers that they have an independent partner to rely on.

We will work to be a critical partner in discussions that affect reliability and security across the interconnection. Decision-makers will use our information to support decisions being made within their jurisdictions to the benefit of reliability and security. To be the trusted and critical partner decision-makers rely on in the Western Interconnection, we will:

Produce publications, insights, and other communications that address the most significant reliability and security risks in the Western Interconnection, empowering decision-makers in the West to make decisions that prioritize reliability.

Develop products that speak to multiple audiences. Everything we develop and produce will consider the needs and perspectives of the stakeholder(s) or stakeholder group(s) for whom those products are intended.

Maintain and promote our neutrality and singular focus on reliability to create a space in which decision-makers can share their diverse perspectives to address the most significant reliability issues.

Impact Area 5: Our highly skilled and engaged employees are champions for reliability.

Our employees will seek us out and remain with us because they are passionate about our vision and mission, our culture, and opportunities to develop and perform work that matters. Our employees will continuously increase their value as trusted partners who produce high quality, credible, and influential work. Our employees will be engaged, highly skilled, and want to be part of an organization that is taking on the most significant reliability issues, because we will:

• Intentionally connect all our employees to our vision, mission, and culture, through our workforce engagement model.

• Create a culture in which we trust each other and are empowered and accountable to challenge the status quo, embrace change, and elevate our contributions.

• Focus on professional development and knowledge transfer to build cross-functional teams, to provide development opportunities to employees, and ensure that we have the bench strength to fulfill our mission.