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This seminar will tell the story of how FERC directed updates to three families of reliability standards and how NERC and industry responded, providing a firsthand account of how regulatory change works in practice. It will cover the history of electric reliability oversight in the United States, legal authorities, and regulatory processes, applying them to reliability standards in the areas of extreme weather, cybersecurity, and inverter-based resources. It will close with observations regarding the effectiveness of reliability oversight in the United States.

David Ortiz is an energy leader with over 15 years of executive experience advancing grid reliability, security, and modernization across federal regulatory, research, and private sector roles. From 2016 to 2024, he was Director of FERC's Office of Electric Reliability, where he led over 90 staff overseeing the development and enforcement of 93 mandatory grid standards. Key accomplishments include establishing proactive winterization requirements that prevented future blackouts following major weather events and establishing a comprehensive cybersecurity program completing 28 utility audits with a 100% implementation rate of risk mitigation recommendations. In that role he testified before Congress three times. From 2013 to 2016, he was a Deputy Assistant Secretary at the U.S. Department of Energy, where he directed a $30-40M R&D program, deploying a nationwide high-resolution grid visibility infrastructure and developing advanced computational tools that accelerated energy management system computations by an order of magnitude, enabling utilities to anticipate and prevent reliability events. Prior to federal service, David was a senior engineer at the RAND Corporation. David earned his doctorate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from University of Michigan and attended Princeton University. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and the IEEE Power and Energy Society. He lives in Washington, DC with his family and two beagles.