Government Energy Policy, Business and Technology

FERC investigates risk of foreign adversary-supplied bulk power equipment, with focus on Huawei, ZTE

Utility Dive: FERC's NOI seeks to understand how much BPS equipment the six adversarial nations supply the U.S., and what risks it poses. Experts say that may be difficult to discern because the information is not public and components and software code are often re-branded by vendors working with utilities.

"It's not necessarily whose name is on the actual appliance itself, but understanding the related components within the systems, or even within the software," Whitney said. "A lot of software and hardware is not monolithic, and the level of understanding really necessary to make reasonable decisions to mitigate third-party risk is not a trivial process."

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