The US Power Outage Study Team (POST) said that the main causes of six reliability incidents in 1999 were the soaring demand for power and changes in the power market.
POST issued a report that made 12 recommendations to improve reliability. These recommendations are: Promoting market-based approaches to ensuring reliability.
Enabling customer participation in competitive energy markets.
Removing barriers to distributed energy.
Supporting reliability standards for bulk power systems.
Supporting information sharing on best practice in the industry.
Enhancing emergency preparations for low-probability, high-impact events on bulk power systems.
Promoting best practice at federal power authorities.
Conducting research into reliability.
Facilitaing regional solutions to siting of generation and transmission equipment.
Promoting public awareness of reliability issues.
Monitoring and assessing the vulnerability to system reliability.
Encouraging conservation to improve reliability.
US Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said that federal restructuring legislation is an essential component of reliability, and he called upon Congress to enact a bill to provide certainty in the competitive market to achieve reliable service. However, the prospect of the bill becoming law this year is very slim.