Please reserve the dates September 29-30, for NEM's Fall Industry Leadership Roundtable to be held in Boston. The meeting will be held at the Hyatt Harborside. Please reserve your room ASAP (617-568-1234 or 1-800-233-1234) to receive the NEM rate of $189 per night. Many thanks to Nate Owen and Bob Potter of Energy Services Group for hosting the meeting. Many thanks also to Mike Foley of First Data Corporation for offering to sponsor other parts of the meeting. A hotlink is provided here for registration.

NEM's Winter Executive Committee Meeting will be held in Newport Beach, California on January 19-20, 2005. Many thanks to Peter Weigand and Ian Carter of Commonwealth Energy for offering to host this event.

Lastly, NEM's spring industry event will be held in Washington, DC at the Marriott Metro Center on either April 21-22, 2005, or April 26-27, 2005.

The Joint U.S.-Canada Taskforce on the August 2003 Blackout has issued a report assessing what remedial actions have been taken over the past year and what work remains to be done. The Taskforce reports that: 1) FirstEnergy, MISO, ECAR, and PJM have implemented the specific remedial actions recommended in the Taskforce's initial report; 2) NERC teams conducted 23 readiness audits to assess utilities' ability to meet reliability responsibilities; 3) a stakeholder workshop was held to develop a common understanding of the need to restate and clarify NERC’s existing reliability standards; 4) the U.S. and Canada established a Bilateral Electric Reliability Organization (ERO) Oversight Group to address institutional issues concerning an international framework for reliability; 5) government agencies in the U.S. and Canada and NERC have cooperated to track progress on actions related to implementation of the Taskforce’s recommendations; 6) most individual grid operators in North America’s interconnected bulk power systems received at least five days of emergency preparedness training before June 30, 2004; and 7) NERC extended the life of its existing Urgent Action Standard 1200, concerning the physical and cyber security of bulk power systems, to August 2005, which will be replaced by a successor standard. The report also identifies a number of remaining challenges including: 1) enactment of federal reliability legislation; 2) completion of the revision of NERC’s existing standards; 3) certification of the ERO by government agencies and approval of its standards; 4) obtaining independent funding for NERC, or the ERO, and the regional councils; 5) reform of the roles of regional councils; and 6) enhancement of the overall security of the electricity sector. The full text of the Report entitled "The August 14th Blackout One Year Later: Actions Taken To Reduce Blackout Risk" is available on the NEM Website.